Wang Wei’s twelve-hundred-year-old poem left unfurled on parchment across the desk in his study: An old man, I want only peace. The things of this world mean nothing. I know no good way to live and I can’t stop getting lost in my thoughts, my ancient forests. The wind that waves the pines loosens my belt. The mountain moon lights me as I play my

trees and humans, at war over the land and water and atmosphere. And she can hear, louder than the quaking leaves, which side will lose by winning.

when you cut down a tree, what you make from it should be at least as miraculous as what you cut down.”

The Golden Guide to Stars, to Rocks and Minerals,

The Golden Guide to Pond Life,

legs almost too small to see, circling his

The Ape Inside Us

when the songs are finished, he adds, Amen, if only because it may be the single oldest word he knows. The older the word, the more likely it is to be both useful and true.

life is going someplace. It wants to know itself; it wants the power of choice. It wants solutions to problems that nothing alive yet knows how to solve, and it’s willing to use even death to find them.