"The bones seem to cut sharply to the center of something keenly alive on the desert even though it is vast and empty and untouchable—and knows no kindness with all...

You feel a deep sense of peace and gratitude, which you hope lasts for a long time. It might not. You’re just an animal—maybe you’ll get a brain tumor or chronic pain and you’ll stop feeling this way. Apparently, forgetting your nature is an inextricable part of your nature.

I know now I was grieving something , the death of an ambition. I started attending reading events at Green Apple Books, my local bookstore, because it was something I liked in grad school, and I had to get myself out of the house. Going to those events was (is) a way of traveling without moving; they have afforded me an incredibly valuable educati... See more

Meanwhile, given that everything we write comes to us via the many lenses of the experiences we’ve accumulated across a life—we speak of trees, for example, according to what we know of trees by actual experience and through what we’ve experienced of trees in books, movies, nursery rhymes, and more—then everything we do is at some level research fo... See more

Contemplating their loss, I could relate to Henry David Thoreau, who, a hundred and seventy years earlier, living not far from where I live now, wrote about mourning the loss of a tree just like mine: A plant which it has taken two centuries to perfect, rising by slow stages into the heavens, has this afternoon ceased to exist . . . Why does not th

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