Every Life
“Because every life that finds you changes the ecosystem. Every warm and breathing thing that crosses your threshold leaves something behind. Something good. Something invisible.”
The story behind the song
"Every Life" closes the album by widening the lens. It starts with Beau, a Yorkshire Terrier we rescued via the RSPCA, who took the sofa on the first night and never gave it back. But it moves outward from there: to farm animals standing in the sun, to hedgehogs and foxes healing at wildlife hospitals, to the trillion microbes building something unseen inside every one of us.
The bridge draws the whole album together with the Leguminatis cycle: the quiz winnings go to the sanctuary, the sanctuary gives an animal a life, the animal gives you a microbiome, the microbiome talks to your brain, your brain decides to care more, and you win the quiz again. It's funny, but it also genuinely describes something real. When we interact with animals and spend time in nature, we encounter microbial communities far richer and more diverse than anything in our homes. The science of interspecies microbiome transfer is still young, but the principle behind it, that proximity to other living things enriches us biologically and not just emotionally, is becoming increasingly well supported.
Going deeper
Ecosystem. A community of living organisms, together with their physical environment, functioning as an interconnected system. The term applies at every scale: a forest, a coral reef, a soil bed, a human gut. What defines an ecosystem is not its size but the fact that its inhabitants depend on one another and on the conditions around them. The gut microbiome is itself an ecosystem, and when a rescued dog takes your sofa, as the song puts it, "he brought his microbiome, we brought ours, and somewhere in between we started building."
Interspecies microbiome transfer. The exchange of microbial communities between species through close physical contact. Research has shown that people who live with dogs share more of their skin and gut microbiota with their pets than with people in other households. Time spent outdoors, contact with soil, and proximity to animals all expose us to microbial diversity that we would not encounter in sealed indoor environments. The long-term health implications are still being studied, but the direction of evidence suggests that microbial diversity, from whatever source, is broadly associated with better health outcomes.
One Health. A framework, endorsed by the World Health Organisation, recognising that human health, animal health, and environmental health are fundamentally interconnected. Rather than treating these as separate domains, One Health argues that the health of one cannot be understood or sustained without the health of the others. The Leguminatis cycle in this song, where caring for an animal leads to a biological exchange that changes how your brain works, which makes you care more, is One Health described as a feedback loop rather than a policy document.