A life like an intricately woven basket, frayed, worn, broken, unraveled, reworked, reknit from many of its original pieces... Life can survive in the constant shadow of illness, and even rise to moments of rampant joy, but the shadow remains, and one has to make space for it.
Diane AckermanAdventure is not something you travel to find. It's something you take with you, or you're not going to find it when you arrive.
Diane AckermanWe tend to think of memories as monuments we once forged and may find intact beneath the weedy growth of years. But, in a real sense, memories are tied to and describe the present. Formed in an idiosyncratic way when they happened, they're also true to the moment of recall, including how you feel, all you've experienced, and new values, passions, and vulnerability. One never steps into the same stream of consciousness twice.
Diane AckermanThe brain is only three pounds of blood, dream, and electricity, and yet from that mortal stew come Beethoven's sonatas. Dizzie Gillespie's jazz. Audrey Hepburn's wish to spend the last month of her life in Somalia, saving children.
Diane AckermanOur sense of safety depends on predictability, so anything living outside the usual rules we suspect to be an outlaw, a ghoul.
Diane AckermanThere is that unique moment when one confronts something new and astonishment begins.
Diane AckermanOf all the errands life seems to be running, of all the mysteries that enchant us, love is my favorite
Diane AckermanLook at your feet. You are standing in the sky. When we think of the sky, we tend to look up, but the sky actually begins at the earth.
Diane AckermanI'm an Earth ecstatic, and my creed is simple: All life is sacred, life loves life, and we are capable of improving our behavior toward one another. As basic as that is, for me it's also tonic and deeply spiritual, glorifying the smallest life-form and embracing the most distant stars.
Diane AckermanWhich is crueler, an old man's lost memories of a life lived, or a young man's lost memories of the life he meant to live?
Diane AckermanOne of the things I like best about animals in the wild is that they're always off on some errand. They have appointments to keep. It's only we humans who wonder what we're here for.
Diane AckermanIn Manhattan last month I heard a woman borrowing the jargon of junkies to say to another, 'Want to do some chocolate?'
Diane AckermanFor 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 China or tree porcupines in the Canadian Rockies, balled up like giant pine cones.
Diane AckermanNothing 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...
Diane AckermanSymbolic 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 it will return to its original form, just as Nature will in time turn our precisely laid-out cities into a weed-way.
Diane AckermanOur relationship with nature has changed radically, irreversibly, but by no means all for the bad. Our new epoch is laced with invention. Our mistakes are legion, but our talent is immeasurable.
Diane AckermanShaped a little like a loaf of French country bread, our brain is a crowded chemistry lab, bustling with nonstop neural conversations.Imagine the brain, that shiny mound of being, that mouse-gray parliament of cells, that dream factory, that petit tyrant inside a ball of bone, that huddle of neurons calling all the plays, that little everywhere, that fickle pleasuredome, that wrinkled wardrobe of selves stuffed into the skull like too many clothes into a gym bag.
Diane AckermanI swear I will not dishonor my soul with hatred, but offer myself humbly as a guardian of nature, as a healer of misery, as a messenger of wonder, as an architect of peace.
Diane AckermanSmell brings to mind... a family dinner of pot roast and sweet potatoes during a myrtle-mad August in a Midwestern town. Smells detonate softly in our memory like poignant land mines hidden under the weedy mass of years.
Diane AckermanAn animal on a leash is not tamed by the owner. The owner is extending himself through the leash to that part of his personality which is pure dog, that part of him which just wants to eat, sleep, bark, hump chairs, wet the floor in joy, and drink out of a toilet bowl.
Diane AckermanHurricane season brings a humbling reminder that, despite our technologies, most of nature remains unpredictable.
Diane AckermanHome is where the heart is, we say, rubbing the flint of one abstraction against another.
Diane AckermanLife is a thing that mutates without warning, not always in enviable ways. All part of the improbable adventure of being alive, of being a brainy biped with giant dreams on a crazy blue planet.
Diane AckermanDespite not knowing if what he felt from moment to moment would pass or last forever, he entered fully into his shifting states of violent rage, self-pity, longing, heartbreak, cynicism, without losing the ability to think about what was happening to him. That took courage, I thought, living with the suffering in a mindful way, as an artifact of being, neither good nor bad.
Diane AckermanPart of the irony of environmentalism is questing for solutions when you know you're part of the problem.
Diane AckermanThere is a furnace in our cells, and when we breathe we pass the world through our bodies, brew it lightly, and turn it loose again, gently altered for having known us.
Diane AckermanDisassociating, mindfulness, transcendence-whatever the label-it's a sort of loophole in our contract with reality, a form of self-rescue.
Diane AckermanEveryone admits that love is wonderful and necessary, yet no one agrees on just what it is.
Diane AckermanLiving with anyone for many years takes skill. To keep peace in the household, couples learn to adapt to one another, hopefully in positive ways.
Diane AckermanIf cynicism is inevitable as one ages, so is the yearning for innocence. To children heaven is being an adult, and to adults heaven is being children again.
Diane AckermanLook at your feet. You are standing in the sky. When we think of the sky, we tend to look up, but the sky actually begins at the earth. We walk through it, yell into it, rake leaves, wash the dog, and drive cars in it. We breathe it deep within us. With every breath, we inhale millions of molecules of sky, heat them briefly, and then exhale them back into the world.
Diane AckermanWhen you consider something like death, after which (there being no news flash to the contrary) we may well go out like a candle flame, then it probably doesn't matter if we try too hard, are awkward sometimes, care for one another too deeply, are excessively curious about nature, are too open to experience, enjoy a nonstop expense of the senses in an effort to know life intimately and lovingly.
Diane AckermanNot much is known about alligators. They don't train well. And they're unwieldy and rowdy to work with in laboratories.
Diane AckermanWords are such small things, like confetti in the brain, and yet they are color and clarify everything, they can stain the mind or warp the feelings.
Diane AckermanA poem records emotions and moods that lie beyond normal language, that can only be patched together and hinted at metaphorically.
Diane Ackerman