Our sense of safety depends on predictability, so anything living outside the usual rules we suspect to be an outlaw, a ghoul.

Our sense of safety depends on predictability, so anything living outside the usual rules we suspect to be an outlaw, a ghoul.

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.

We evolved as creatures knitted into the fabric of nature, and without its intimate truths, we can find ourselves unraveling.

Knee-deep in the cosmic overwhelm, I’m stricken by the ricochet wonder of it all: the plain everythingness of everything, in cahoots with the everythingness of everything else.

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.

There are well-dressed foolish ideas just as there are well-dressed fools.