I found myself falling down a rabbit hole of time that led me into strange other worlds. But unlike Alice, who explored a fantasy wonderland full of the topsy-turvy features of an imaginative mind, I was entering real worlds that once all resided right here on our own planet earth.
The seemingly impossible becomes possible when all the generations are strung together, each of us playing a humble role in a magnificently evolving lifeline. The monarch knows this instinctively.
Some see the glass half empty while others see the glass half full. But Joe showed us something different—how to savor each drop.
Night after night, I heard the porcupine chewing away at my flowers, and each morning saw new patches destroyed by its voracious appetite. I was still enamored with the porcupine and all the wildness it symbolizes—but I wanted it destroyed.
Those at the end of their time on earth do not show us what to do on our deathbeds but what to do in our lives.
It’s a brisk fall day, the sky weighed down by leaded clouds, and we are embarking on another shoreline cleanup in Maine, wary not of the waves, wind, and a potential rainstorm, but of what we will encounter across the bay.
Why do I need to know whether it’s a warbler or a kinglet that is shaking the pine needles in front of me? For the same reason I need to know if it’s Susan or Mary who I see at a party.
As we spent more time in Maine, I came to discover the blessings of sea smoke, which reveals more by showing less.
Despite their big obtrusive antlers and bodies so large they look like they just walked in from the Pleistocene, the moose blend in to the background, and you don’t even know they are there.
I have lost control. I'm a good swimmer. But the rapids' strong vortex spins me and sucks me under, making my struggle to surface a battle with a force much greater than I.
Sometimes a hat is all it takes for people to expect different things from you.
Every day I go on an insect safari in my backyard flower garden. Armed with my iPhone and and observant and patient eye, I trail whatever flying bug comes my way and snap a picture of it when it stops to rest or eat, or zoom in and take pictures of the specks skating the surface of flower petals. Every day my findings amaze me.
She is a woman of a certain age. Gray hair. Paunch no longer mistaken for pregnancy. Comfortable shoes. A chin with an echo of itself. A woman no one notices. What a relief!
I knew mating dragonflies often fly together, the tip of one abdomen attached to that of the other. I’ve seen the wheel or, more appropriate, heart shapes these dragonflies form while sperm transfers into the female’s sperm storage sac she uses to fertilize her eggs. But these two autumn meadowhawks are lined up in tandem. Why?
