My mother always said I must be part Mongolian because of my lotus-pale complexion and squid-ink black hair.

Apes do it. Scorpions do it. Fireflies do it,

Nothing is more memorable than a smell. One scent can be unexpected, momentary and fleeting, yet conjure up a childhood summer beside a lake in the mountains.

I’m fascinated how often and with what whole-heartedness people will risk their lives to perform acts of courage, sacrifice, and compassion for total strangers.

Five weeks in the hospital fled as if down a sinkhole into the middle of the earth. … Can waiting by definition slow, flash by? … Time becomes even more elastic than usual–minutes can stretch...

I may enter a zone of transcendence, in which I marvel at all the accidents of fate, since the beginning of life on earth, that led to my genes being created and my standing in...

For better or worse, zoos are how most people come to know big or exotic animals. Few will ever see wild penguins sledding downhill to sea on their bellies, giant pandas holding bamboo lollipops in...

The garden is a living, pulsing, singing, scratching, warring, erotic, and generally rowdy thing. I may find peace in its midst, but I regard it as a whole with many parts, a plural organism.

Listen, I’d rather lie naked in a plowed field under an incontinent horse for a week than have to read that paragraph again!

Nature is more like a seesaw than a crystal, a never-ending conga line of bold moves and corrections.

Touch seems to be as essential as sunlight

Love is the best school, but the tuition is high and the homework can be painful.

The simple, stupefying truth that, as a woman, I am a minute ocean, in the dark tropic of whose womb eggs lay coded as roe, floating in the sea that wet-nursed us all, moved me...

The Lutz heck that emerges from his writings and actions drifted like a weather vane: charming when need be, cold-blooded when need be, tigerish or endearing, depending on his goal. Still, it is surprising that...

Symbolic of life, hair bolts from our head[s]. Like the earth, it can be harvested, but it will rise again. We can change its color and texture when the mood strikes us, but in time...

Look in the mirror. The face that pins you with its double gaze reveals a chastening secret.

When all is said and done, we exist only in relation to the world, and our senses evolved as scouts who bridge that divide and provide volumes of information, warnings and rewards.

In our heart we know that life loves life. Yet we feast on some of the other life-forms with which we share our planet; we kill to live. Taste is what carries us across that...

I like knowing that the further back one traces any lineage, the narrower the path grows, to the haunt of just a few shaggy ancestors, with luck on their side, little gizmos in their cells...

I don’t want to be a passenger in my own life

We ogle plants and animals up close on television, the Internet and in the movies. We may not worship the animals we see, but we still regard them as necessary physical and spiritual companions. Technological...

Wonder is the heaviest element on the periodic table. Even a tiny fleck of it stops time.

Who would deduce the dragonfly from the larva, the iris from the bud, the lawyer from the infant? …We are all shape-shifters and magical reinventors. Life is really a plural noun, a caravan of selves.

When a hurricane thrashes the mid-Atlantic, my hilly town often reaps the fringe of the storm. The rain starts blowing sideways, and sometimes we see hail the size of purie marbles.

Even without seeing the crickets, grasshoppers, cicadas and katydids, we hear them shrilling in this season and trust that they’re the tiny living gargoyles entomologists claim.

For if I do something, I never do it thoughtlessly.

On some summer days in New York City, the air hangs thickly visible, like the combined exhalations of eight million souls. Steam rising from vents underground makes you wonder if there isn’t one giant sweat...

There is no way in which to understand the world without first detecting it through the radar-net of our senses.

I’d suffered many losses in recent years after my father mother uncle aunt and cousin had all passed away. In her final years my mother often lamented that there was no one alive who had...

We’re losing biodiversity globally at an alarming rate, and we need a cornucopia of different plants and animals, for the planet’s health and our own.

In the winter, I enjoy cross-country skiing and raising orchids and amaryllises. If I could grow tropical flowers as perennials, I would, especially hibiscus and mandavilla.

The sensory misers will inherit the earth, but first they will make it not worth living on. When you consider something like death, after which we may well go out like a candle flame, then...

Devising a vocabulary for gardening is like devising a vocabulary for sex. There are the correct Latin names, but most people invent euphemisms. Those who refer to plants by Latin name are considered more expert,...

Everyone admits that love is wonderful and necessary, yet no one agrees on just what it is.

We embrace two-legged beings, and can warm to four-legged beings, too, but for most people, six legs is pushing it. Most don’t need multi-eyed, antennaed face time.

Metaphor isn’t just decorative language. If it were, it wouldn’t scare us so much. . . . Colorful language threatens some people, who associate it, I think, with a kind of eroticism (playing with language...

As people flock to urban centers where ground space is limited, cities with green walls and roofs and skyscraper farms offer improved health and well-being, renewable resources, reliable food supply, and relief to the environment.

Hit a tripwire of smell and memories explode all at once. A complex vision leaps out of the undergrowth.

Frantic and serene, vigilant and calm, wrung-out and fortified, explosive and sedate—love commands a vast army of moods. Hoping for victory, limping from the latest skirmish, lovers enter the arena once again. Sitting still, we...

All relationships change the brain – but most important are the intimate bonds that foster or fail us, altering the delicate circuits that shape memories, emotions and that ultimate souvenir, the self.

Though not a natural world by any means, more like a collection of living dioramas, a zoo exists in its own time zone, somewhere between the seasonal sense of animals and our madly ticking watch...

Alligators have beautiful undulating skin, which feels dense, spongy, solid, like the best eraser.

I don’t want to be a passenger in my own life.

We try to exile ourselves more and more from nature – not always consciously: We build houses; we dismiss nature; nature has to be outside, because we’re inside. God forbid something like a cockroach comes...

It began in mystery, and it will end in mystery, but what a savage and beautiful country lies in between.

As a species, we’ve somehow survived large and small ice ages, genetic bottlenecks, plagues, world wars and all manner of natural disasters, but I sometimes wonder if we’ll survive our own ingenuity.

I think if you look at any facet of nature in enough detail, you find it fascinating. How could you not? The universe is so full of marvels. Here’s an example — rain, the shape...