Sublime

would note in passing that there was “a bird” in the garden. I hadn’t thought that it might be the same bird, coming at the same time, to do the same things, day after day, and I felt a greater sense of connection to the wildlife around me.

There are no individuals. There aren’t even separate species. Everything in the forest is the forest.

She reads Thoreau over wood fires at night.

Rather, as I got sicker that winter, I no longer had the sense that I was a distinct person. On most days, I felt like a mechanism that moved arduously through the world simply trying to complete its tasks.

opportunity from the wider landscape to encounter Rackham’s ‘exquisite beauty of the small and complex and unexpected’.

The fables seem to be less about people turning into other living things than about other living things somehow reabsorbing, at the moment of greatest danger, the wildness inside people that never really went away.

Through wildlife studies of various species of captive animals, it was found that no matter how lovingly their zoo plazas are constructed, no matter how much their human keepers love them, as indeed they do, the creatures often become unable to breed, their appetites for food and rest become skewed, their vital behaviors dwindle to lethargy,