Something immigrant about the air I breathe

Jenny Odell, in How to do Nothing, p. 151.

Odell talks about how hard it is to find where your drinking water comes from.  Oakland's drinking water comes from the Mokelumne River.  But the "headwaters" are hard to pinpoint.  

On Google Maps, I traced the North Fork Mokelumne River up the mountains to a place called Highland Lakes. But along its course, the river is also fed by creeks coming in from different locations.... [H]eadwaters defy delineation, since every creek starts as the dispersed accumulation of snow or rain, trickling underground into streams that join larger streams that later emerge as springs -- a gradual collecting of pathways that looks like a delta in reverse.

Odell continues:

I find something comfortingly anti-essentialist in the way ecology works. As someone who is both Asian and white, I am an anomaly or a nonentity from an essentialist point of view. It's not possible for me to be "native" to anywhere in any obvious sense. But things like the atmospheric river, or even the sight of Western tanagers ( a favorite bird) migrating through Oakland in the spring, gives me an image of how to be from two places at once. I remember that the sampaguita, while it's the national flower of the Philippines, actually originated in the Himalayas before being imported in the seventeenth century. I remember that not only is my mother an immigrant, but tht there is something immigrant about the air I breathe, the water I drink, the carbon in my bones, and the thoughts in my mind.

An ecological understanding allows us to identify "things" -- rain, cloud, river -- at the same time that it reminds us that these identities are fluid. Even mountains erode, and the ground below us moves in giant plates.  It reminds us that -- while it's useful to have a word for that thing called a cloud -- when we really get down to it, all we can really point to is a series of flows and relationships that sometimes intersect and hold together long enough to be a "cloud."