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But I want to be earnest, even if it’s embarrassing. The photographer Alec Soth said, “To me, the most beautiful thing is vulnerability.”

I don’t buy the romantic notion that scientific understanding somehow robs the universe of its beauty.

Rivers keep going, and we keep going, and there is no way back…. But the memory still holds me together.

We were not afraid to say “I love you” to each other.

My friend Stan Muller tells me that when you’re living in the middle of history, you never know what it means.

I remember thinking that I would never be a kid again, not really, which was the first time I can recall feeling that intense longing for the you to whom you can never return.

I was worried at the end of college would spell the end of our relationship, and I wanted her to reassure me, to tell me that I need to not fear being alone, because she would always be there, and etc. But she wasn’t the sort of person to make false promises, and most promises featuring the word “always” are unkeepable. Everything ends, or at least everything humans have thus far observed ends.

Even if geese have become mundane, there remains something awe-inspiring about seeing them fly overhead in a perfect V formation. As one enthusiast put it, the Canada goose “excites the imagination and quickens the heartbeat.” More than pigeons or mice or rats, geese still feel wild to me.

But most days I would lie and tell her that school was fine. I didn’t want my hurt to travel through to her.

This is a memory that you cannot return to.

When Pablo Picasso saw the cave paintings on a visit that year, he reportedly said, “We have invented nothing.”

Nothing lies like memory.

Marveling at the perfection of that leaf, I was reminded that aesthetic beauty is as much about how and whether you look as what you see. From the quark to the supernova, the wonders do not cease. It is our attentiveness that is in short supply, our ability and willingness to do the work that are on inspires.

Marveling at the perfection of that leaf, I was reminded that aesthetic beauty is as much about how and whether you look as what you see.

One shoulder told the New York Times that the books were “as popular as pin-up girls.”

Very little of the future is predictable. That uncertainty terrifies me, just as it terrified those before me.

It’s sort of comforting to know that even Isaac Newton exaggerated what he got done during his plague year.

I feel like the spark that Santi and I had from the first moment we saw each other, that’s quickly becoming more like the most beautiful lightning storm, is going to…what? We take our chances with distance? We let it die out?

Now, when the red leaves are all down and the geese are gone, I go looking for witch hazel. It never lets me down, always carrying the memory of that Christmas and how their friendship was medicine for each other. I cherish a witch hazel kind of day, a scrap of color, a light in the window when winter is closing all around

the grammar of animacy

But imagine the possibilities. Imagine the access we would have to different perspectives. the things we might see through other eyes, the wisdom that surrounds us. We don't have to figure out everything by ourselves: there are intelligences other than our own, teachers all around us. Imagine how much less lonely the world would be

Imagine walking through a richly inhabited world of Birch people, Bear people, Rock people, beings we think of and therefore speak of as persons worthy of our respect, of inclusion in a peopled world. We Americans are reluctant to learn a foreign language of our own species, let alone another species.

“But just because we don't think of them as humans doesn't mean they aren't beings. Isn't it even more disrespectful to assume that we're the only species that counts as 'per-sons'?" The arrogance of English is that the only way to be animate, to be worthy of respect and moral concern, is to be a human.

She kneels along the trail to inspect a set of moose tracks, saying, "Someone's already been this way this morning." "Someone is in my hat," she says, shaking out a deerfly. Someone, not something.

My friend Michael Nelson, an ethicist who thinks a great deal about moral inclusion, told me about a woman he knows, a field biologist whose work is among other-than-humans. Most of her companions are not two-legged, and so her language has shifted to accommodate her relationships.

After all, there aren't two worlds, there is just this one good green earth.