Smell 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.

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

Humans are the most successful invasives of all time.

Flying has changed how we imagine our planet, which we have seen whole from space, so that even the farthest nations are ecological neighbors. It has changed our ideas about time. When you can gird the earth at 1,000 m.p.h., how can you endure the tardiness of a plumber? Most of all, flying has changed our sense of our body, the personal space in which we live, now elastic and swift. I could be in Bombay for afternoon tea if I wished. My body isn't limited by its own weaknesses; it can rush through space.

poetry had everything to teach me about life.

Happiness doesn't require laughter, only well-being and a sense that the world is breaking someone else's heart, not mine.

And yet, words are the passkeys to our souls. Without them, we can't really share the enormity of our lives.