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The Idea Of Safety Had Shrunk Into Particles - One Snug Moment, Then The Next. Meanwhile, The Brain Piped Fugues Of Worry And Staged Mind-theaters Full Of Tragedies And Triumphs, Because Unfortunately, The Fear Of Death Does Wonders To Focus The Mind, Inspire Creativity, And Heightens The Senses. Trusting One's Hunches Only Seems Gamble If One Has Time For Seem; Otherwise The Brain Goes On Autopilot And Trades The Elite Craft Of Analysis For The Best Rapid Insights That Float Up From Its Danger Files And Ancient Bag Of Tricks.

-Diane Ackerman

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The Idea Of Safety

Diane Ackerman

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The Idea Of Safety Had Shrunk Into Particles - One Snug Moment, Then The Next. Meanwhile, The Brain Piped Fugues Of Worry And Staged Mind-theaters Full Of Tragedies And Triumphs, Because Unfortunately, The Fear Of Death Does Wonders To Focus The Mind, Inspire Creativity, And Heightens The Senses. Trusting One's Hunches Only Seems Gamble If One Has Time For Seem; Otherwise The Brain Goes On Autopilot And Trades The Elite Craft Of Analysis For The Best Rapid Insights That Float Up From Its Danger Files And Ancient Bag Of Tricks.

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Libraries Change Lives. They Are The Soul Of A People.

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Habit, A Particularly Insidious Thug Who Chokes Passion And Smothers Love. Habit Puts Us On Autopilot.

Fear Is Danger To Your Body, But Disgust Is Danger To Your Soul.

I 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.

In The Absence Of Touching And Being Touched, People Of All Ages Can Sicken And Grow Touched Starved. Touch Seems To Be As Essential As Sunlight.

And Yet, Words Are The Passkeys To Our Souls. Without Them, We Can't Really Share The Enormity Of Our Lives.

We Live On The Leash Of Our Senses.

Home Is Where The Heart Is, We Say, Rubbing The Flint Of One Abstraction Against Another.

Home Is Where The Heart Is

Touch Seems To Be As Essential As Sunlight.

Nothing Reveals More About The Inner Life Of A People Than Their Arts.

So Often Loneliness Comes From Being Out Of Touch With Parts Of Oneself. We Go Searching For Those Parts In Other People, But There's A Difference Between Feeling Separate From Others And Separate From Oneself.

The Heart Is A Museum, Filled With The Exhibits Of A Lifetime's Loves.

There Is That Unique Moment When One Confronts Something New And Astonishment Begins.

Though We Marry As Adults, We Don't Marry Adults. We Marry Children Who Have Grown Up And Still Rejoice In Being Children, Especially If We're Creative.

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We Have Vexed And Bothered Every Plant And Every Animal On Every Continent.

I Don't Want To Get To The End Of My Life And Find That I Lived Just The Length Of It. I Want To Have Lived The Width Of It As Well.

Nature Neither Gives Nor Expects Mercy.

In Our Heart We Know That Life Loves Life. Yet We Feast On Some Of The Other Life-forms With Which We Share Our Planet; We Kill To Live. Taste Is What Carries Us Across That Rocky Moral Terrain, What Makes The Horror Palatable, And The Paradox We Could Not Defend By Reason Melts Into A Jungle Of Sweet Temptations.

In The Early Years Of The Uprising, We Survived On One Meal A Day Of Horse Meat And Soup, But By The End We Ate Only Dried Peas, Dogs, Cats And Birds.

Violets Smell Like Burnt Sugar Cubes That Have Been Dipped In Lemon And Velvet.

We Ogle Plants And Animals Up Close On Television, The Internet And In The Movies. We May Not Worship The Animals We See, But We Still Regard Them As Necessary Physical And Spiritual Companions. Technological Nature Can't Completely Satisfy That Yearning.

Habitats Keep Evolving New Pageants Of Species, And We Shouldn't Interfere.

Choice Is A Signature Of Our Species.

I Think That Very Often Younger Writers Don't Appreciate How Much Hard Work Is Involved In Writing. The Part Of Writing That's Magic Is The Thinnest Rind On The World Of Creation. Most Of A Writer's Life Is Just Work. It Happens To Be A Kind Of Work That The Writer Finds Fulfilling In The Same Way That A Watchmaker Can Happily Spend Countless Hours Fiddling Over The Tiny Cogs And Bits Of Wire. ... I Think The People Who End Up Being Writers Are People Who Don't Get Bored Doing That Kind Of Tight Focus In Small Areas.

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.

As The Most Social Apes, We Inhabit A Mirror-world In Which Every Important Relationship, Whether With Spouse, Friend Or Child, Shapes The Brain, Which In Turn Shapes Our Relationships.

Important Relationships

Couples Are Jigsaw Puzzles That Hang Together By Touching In Just Enough Points.

Much Of Life Becomes Background, But It Is The Province Of Art To Throw Buckets Of Light Into The Shadows And Make Life New Again.

I Think If You Look At Any Facet Of Nature In Enough Detail, You Find It Fascinating. How Could You Not? The Universe Is So Full Of Marvels. Here's An Example -- Rain, The Shape Of Rain. I Was Minding My Own Business, Working On My Book, Looking Out The Window, And It Was Raining And I Was Noticing That The Raindrops Were Falling In That Classic Round-looking Way, And I Thought, 'i Wonder If Raindrops Really Are Round?' So I Started Researching It A Little, And I Discovered That Raindrops Change Shape 300 Times A Second.

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Our 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.

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As A Species, We've Somehow Survived Large And Small Ice Ages, Genetic Bottlenecks, Plagues, World Wars And All Manner Of Natural Disasters, But I Sometimes Wonder If We'll Survive Our Own Ingenuity.

What Would Dawn Have Been Like, Had You Awakened? It Would Have Sung Through Your Bones. All I Can Do This Morning Is Let It Sing Through Mine.

For 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.

I Watched Her Face Switch Among The Radio Stations Of Memory

The Idea Of Safety Had Shrunk Into Particles - One Snug Moment, Then The Next. Meanwhile, The Brain Piped Fugues Of Worry And Staged Mind-theaters Full Of Tragedies And Triumphs, Because Unfortunately, The Fear Of Death Does Wonders To Focus The Mind, Inspire Creativity, And Heightens The Senses. Trusting One's Hunches Only Seems Gamble If One Has Time For Seem; Otherwise The Brain Goes On Autopilot And Trades The Elite Craft Of Analysis For The Best Rapid Insights That Float Up From Its Danger Files And Ancient Bag Of Tricks.

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.

Poetry Had Everything To Teach Me About Life.

Love Is Like A Batik Created From Many Emotional Colors, It Is A Fabric Whose Pattern And Brightness May Vary.

We Are Defined By How We Place Our Attention.

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.

There 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.

A Self Is A Frightening Thing To Waste, It's The Lens Through Which One's Whole Life Is Viewed, And Few People Are Willing To Part With It, In Death, Or Even Imaginatively, In Art.

Because We Can't Escape Our Ancient Hunger To Live Close To Nature, We Encircle The House With Lawns And Gardens, Install Picture Windows, Adopt Pets And Boston Ferns, And Scent Everything That Touches Our Lives.

A Kiss Is Like Singing Into Someone's Mouth.

When I Go Biking, I Repeat A Mantra Of The Day's Sensations: Bright Sun, Blue Sky, Warm Breeze, Blue Jay's Call, Ice Melting And So On. This Helps Me Transcend The Traffic, Ignore The Clamorings Of Work, Leave All The Mind Theaters Behind And Focus On Nature Instead. I Still Must Abide By The Rules Of The Road, Of Biking, Of Gravity. But I Am Mentally Far Away From Civilization. The World Is Breaking Someone Else's Heart.

A Poem Records Emotions And Moods That Lie Beyond Normal Language, That Can Only Be Patched Together And Hinted At Metaphorically.

Part Of The Irony Of Environmentalism Is Questing For Solutions When You Know You're Part Of The Problem.

Of All The Errands Life Seems To Be Running, Of All The Mysteries That Enchant Us, Love Is My Favorite

Writing Is My Form Of Celebration And Prayer.

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.

If 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.

Love, Like Truth, Is The Unassailable Defense.

Love Is The Great Intangible. ... Frantic And Serene, Vigilant And Calm, Wrung-out And Fortified, Explosive And Sedate -- Love Commands A Vast Army Of Moods. Hoping For Victory, Limping From The Latest Skirmish, Lovers Enter The Arena Once Again. ... Love Is The White Light Of Emotion. ... Everyone Admits That Love Is Wonderful And Necessary, Yet No One Can Agree On What It Is.

We Try To Exile Ourselves More And More From Nature - Not Always Consciously: We Build Houses; We Dismiss Nature; Nature Has To Be Outside, Because We're Inside. God Forbid Something Like A Cockroach Comes Inside, Or Some Dust.

Complexity Excites The Mind, And Order Rewards It. In The Garden, One Finds Both, Including Vanishingly Small Orders Too Complex To Spot, And Orders So Vast The Mind Struggles To Embrace Them.

The Well Of Nature Is Full Today. Time To Go Outside And Take A Drink.

The Knowing, I Told Myself, Is Only A Vapor Of The Mind, And Yet It Can Wreck Havok With One's Sanity.

Give A Man Enough Rope And He'll Wrap Himself Around Your Little Finger.

Our Sense Of Safety Depends On Predictability, So Anything Living Outside The Usual Rules We Suspect To Be An Outlaw, A Ghoul.

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Katharine Hepburn

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