and I realized we’re actually all the same: strangers, smiling on a screen.

It colors the space blue because now it can.

You can tell that the poet misses his pet, misses this unique relationship in his life that—itself like a star—helped orient him on certain too-quiet nights when he was lost at sea. It is a marvelous demonstration of how to write about animals: by using specific memories, and not anthropomorphizing them to such a degree that they lose their essential dogginess or catness or mongooseness, but, instead, by recognizing their striking, sometimes sublime differences from us, alongside their similarities. ​ Sometimes, it is enough, as Neruda understood, to have someone look at us to remind us we exist, and that someone, or something, cares that we do. ​ listening with drooping eyes and the occasional blustery sneeze.) He was wonderfully just-there, an uncritical receptacle for my childhood loneliness.

the horses running until they forget that they are horses.

I think astrology has stuck around for thousands of years precisely because it is so good at being a kind of infrastructure for those conversations.

When you collect marine animals there are certain flat worms so delicate that they are almost impossible to capture whole, for they break and tatter under the touch. You must let them ooze and crawl of their own will onto a knife blade and then lift them gently into your bottle of sea water. And perhaps that might be the way to write this book — to open the page and let the stories crawl in by themselves. ​ Her purpose in this project is to bring to the attention of the whole community, art that exists in its own context, ​ The artist creates a structure — whether that’s a map or a cordoned-off area — that holds open a contemplative space against the pressures of habit and familiarity that constantly threaten to close it. ​ Actually, I’ve always found it weird that it’s called birdwatching, because half if not more of birdwatching is actually birdlistening. I personally think they should just rename it birdnoticing. ​ That ended up being two years. I recently asked him how he spent that time, and his answer was that he read a lot, rode his bike, studied math ​ In nature, things that grow unchecked are often parasitic or cancerous. And yet, we inhabit a culture that privileges novelty and growth over the cyclical and the regenerative. Indeed our very idea of productivity is premised on the idea of producing something new, whereas we do not tend to see maintenance and care as productive in the same way.

standing in a new kitchen barefoot ​ face full of wind. ​ and each one brought a delight so unexpected and profound, it made me shiver with the delicate aliveness of it all.