Because we can't escape our ancient hunger to live close to nature, we encircle the house with lawns and gardens, install picture windows, adopt pets and Boston ferns, and scent everything that touches our lives.
As people flock to urban centers where ground space is limited, cities with green walls and roofs and skyscraper farms offer improved health and well-being, renewable resources, reliable food supply, and relief to the environment.
I've always loved scuba diving and the cell-tickling feel of being underwater, though it poses unique frustrations. Alone, but with others, you may share the same sights and feelings, but you can't communicate well.
I like knowing that the further back one traces any lineage, the narrower the path grows, to the haunt of just a few shaggy ancestors, with luck on their side, little gizmos in their cells and a future storied with impulses and choices that will ultimately define them.
On some summer days in New York City, the air hangs thickly visible, like the combined exhalations of eight million souls. Steam rising from vents underground makes you wonder if there isn't one giant sweat gland lodged beneath the city.
Habitats keep evolving new pageants of species, and we shouldn't interfere.
When a hurricane thrashes the mid-Atlantic, my hilly town often reaps the fringe of the storm. The rain starts blowing sideways, and sometimes we see hail the size of purie marbles.
Cicadas, buckling and unbuckling their stomach muscles, yield the sound of someone sharpening scissors. Fall field crickets, the thermometer hounds, add high-pitched tinkling chirps to the jazz, and their call quickens with warm weather, slows again with cool.
Though not a natural world by any means, more like a collection of living dioramas, a zoo exists in its own time zone, somewhere between the seasonal sense of animals and our madly ticking watch time.
We tend to think of heroes only in terms of violent combat, whether it's against enemies or a natural disaster. But human beings also perform radical acts of compassion; we just don't talk about them, or we don't talk about them as much.
As a species, we've somehow survived large and small ice ages, genetic bottlenecks, plagues, world wars and all manner of natural disasters, but I sometimes wonder if we'll survive our own ingenuity.
I don't want to be a passenger in my own life.
Look in the mirror. The face that pins you with its double gaze reveals a chastening secret.
We ogle plants and animals up close on television, the Internet and in the movies. We may not worship the animals we see, but we still regard them as necessary physical and spiritual companions. Technological nature can't completely satisfy that yearning.
The further we distance ourselves from the spell of the present, explored by our senses, the harder it will be to understand and protect nature's precarious balance, let alone the balance of our own human nature.
Gardeners may create order briefly out of chaos, but nature always gets the last word, and what it says is usually untidy by human standards. But I find all states of nature beautiful, and because I want to delight in my garden, not rule it, I just accept my yen to tame the chaos on one day and let the Japanese beetles run riot on the next.
The simple, stupefying truth that, as a woman, I am a minute ocean, in the dark tropic of whose womb eggs lay coded as roe, floating in the sea that wet-nursed us all, moved me deeply.
When all is said and done, we exist only in relation to the world, and our senses evolved as scouts who bridge that divide and provide volumes of information, warnings and rewards.
The garden is a living, pulsing, singing, scratching, warring, erotic, and generally rowdy thing. I may find peace in its midst, but I regard it as a whole with many parts, a plural organism.
In the winter, I enjoy cross-country skiing and raising orchids and amaryllises. If I could grow tropical flowers as perennials, I would, especially hibiscus and mandavilla.
