Sublime

nature makes only what she wants where she wants and when she wants.

Nature only needs "What works." And, as Meg Wheatley points out, it isn't "What works best." Nature doesn't care if it's not perfect. If it's a solution that works, nature uses it.

Nature transcends our tendencies to label and classify, to reduce and limit. The natural world is unfathomably more rich, interwoven, and complicated than we are taught, and so much more mysterious and beautiful.

I want to understand how we humans do that—how we earn a place on this precious planet, get in the “right relationship” with it.5 So I am focusing on the ways creatures and ecosystems function together in and with the natural world.

mono no aware. This Japanese term, which literally means ‘pathos of things’, describes the deep emotion that is evoked when we are touched by nature, art or the lives of others with an awareness of their transience. It also refers to the essence of things and our ability to feel that essence.

When we contemplate nature (a forest in the autumn, for example, or the reproductive cycle of the salmon), we are thinking about rules that in their broad, irresistible structure apply to ourselves as well. We too must mature, seek to reproduce, age, fall ill and die. We face a litany of other burdens too: we will never be fully understood by