One essay, for instance, considers the gradual and extremely complicated metamorphosis of sure bugs, reminiscent of dragonflies, to replicate on the significance of incremental evolution within the local weather motion and our lives extra broadly. “We develop imperfectly, incompletely,” she writes. “I’m speaking in regards to the delicate shifts, the months of molting, swimming beneath the floor, questioning what it’s all for—till the second arrives if you rise above the water solely to understand that each one the when you thought that you just have been drowning, you have been studying find out how to fly.”

Over time, Defebaugh explains, her weekly meditations have run parallel to her personal story of metamorphosis as a trans lady. “In some methods, I wrote [these essays] for myself, to assist me navigate the final 4 years of my life, which have been a time of immense change,” she says. “Every week was about taking a look at a special lesson from the tree of life that I might tether myself to—what might I be taught from frogs about staying porous after I felt so susceptible? What might I be taught from butterflies about how lovely and brutal metamorphosis might be? It was a method for me to maintain going, and the truth that it resonated with different individuals, effectively, I nonetheless don’t perceive. However I’m grateful for it.”

Reverence, the opening chapter of the e-book, is a theme Defebaugh has been acquainted with for so long as she will bear in mind. “My mom instilled in me an important sense of surprise for the world after I was a child. Reverence invokes emotions of respect and honor, but it surely’s additionally humbling, and after I examine the pure world, it’s one of many issues I’m most grateful for—how a lot it humbles me to do not forget that I’m only a small a part of this vastly interconnected entity,” she says. Certainly, religious ecology dictates that, as people, we ought to know ourselves as expressions of nature, and like bushes, bees, or beavers, each one among us has a particular goal on earth.

As a younger baby, Defebaugh, who was deeply in contact along with her personal sense of goal, prophesied she’d sooner or later change into a author. In truth, she even remembers telling her dad and mom in some unspecified time in the future that she’d develop as much as change into the editor-in-chief of an environmental journal. “I don’t understand how I knew that, however I’ve at all times had this sense of surprise in regards to the world and an understanding that the one method I might have the ability to stay on this world can be by falling in love with it,” she says.