Sublime

knowing when they turned. It is a surprising and memorable, as well as valuable experience, to be

But with a spike of pleasant surprise, Miranda realized they were all like her in that moment. Products of different worlds and evolutionary paths—natural and accelerated—yet like her. The same drive to know burned in them, a convergence in the way their intellects worked, so that each species had reached the point where, faced with a mystery, they

Same species, same earth, different stories.

Their existence gives the lie to the thought that the wild is always something untouched by human hearts and hands. The wild can be human work.

My porous nature seemed much less of a problem here. That permeability had always meant that I was too easily affected by other persons—by other nervous systems shaped so much like my own. Yet such porosity was just right, I now realized, for engaging nervous systems very different from my own. It was just right for entering into felt relation with

To return and return and return is to come into relatedness with a specific tree and the surrounding land.

But just the opposite occurs, for the sooty woman, the mud woman, is beloved by the Wild Woman and protected by her unequivocally.