Shape-Shifters and Magical Reinventors, All

My admiration for Diane Ackerman dates from my first encounter with her unique blend of earthy spiritualism and a poetic sense of the material world. A Natural History of the Senses was published in 1993, and I have been shadowing her ever since. She lives in Ithaca, New York with her husband, writer Paul West. She has won a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Lavan Poetry Prize, the John Burroughs Nature Award and named a “Literary Lion” by the New York Public Library. My favorite fact about DA is that she has a molecule named after her—the dianeackerone.

Her books are delicious in their fullness, but her wisdom can be nuggeted as well. (I know I’m not the only one who loves Quotes from Smart People.) Here are some of Ackerman’s to add to your trove:

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I don’t want to get to the end of my life and find that I have just lived the length of it. I want to have lived the width of it as well.

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Look 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.

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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.

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There was nothing to do but wait. It is always like this for naturalists, and for poets–the long hours of travel and preparation, and then the longer hours of waiting. All for that one electric, pulse-revving vision when the universe suddenly declares itself.

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Amazingly, the same neurons fire whether we do something or watch someone else do the same thing, and both summon similar feelings. Learning from our own mishaps isn’t as safe as learning from someone else’s, which helps us decipher the world of intentions, making our social world possible. The brain evolved clever ways to spy or eavesdrop on risk, to fathom another’s joy or pain quickly, as detailed sensations, without resorting to words. We feel what we see, we experience others as self.

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Below us somewhere in the gelatinous phantasmagoria of churning blue, the whales wouldn’t be much aware of the storm.