Orion

IN MY ADULT LIFE, I’ve had just one occasion on which to draw from six years of Spanish language instruction, in late 2015 when my father and I stayed for a week in Murcia. We’d been invited there to teach English by day; by night he’d sleep, and I’d try to sleep, only to wake up at twelve or one with no better plan than to put on my sneakers and roam the city streets. I drifted between cafés in the dark that week, encountering several times the same ghostly bunch of Swedish travelers who lamented to me in perfect English how this was the only place where they felt alive. At one café, news broke of an attack in Paris, and I pulled from the depths what little vocabulary…

THESE DAYS, attention and lost attention are regular houseguests in my mind. How can they not be? I am a young person navigating life at a time when everything—everything—is designed to distract me. I worry about what it means for all of us when our attention is too fragmented to focus. How can we love the world when we cannot pay attention to it? Robin Wall Kimmerer said in a conversation with Krista Tippett that attention is the doorway to gratitude, to wonder, to reciprocity. “And it worries me greatly,” she continued, “that today’s children can recognize one hundred corporate logos and fewer than ten plants. That means they’re not paying attention.” My brother’s daughter is four and loves nothing more than playing on the grass in my mother’s garden. Whenever…

FIVE YEARS AGO, Dutch elm disease finally killed what may have been the last remaining English elm grove in the United States. Planted more than two hundred years ago at an estate that is now Woodlands Cemetery—a West Philadelphia haven where I sometimes go to read and think—the Seven Giants reached ninety feet. Sometimes a man would park his car in the elms’ shade and practice his saxophone; whenever he’d make a mistake—which was often—he would stop playing and curse loudly and kick the car. What entertainment for the trees in their autumn years! Now they loom as monolithic shark-gray amputees, more morbid than any of the graves at their roots. Dutch elm disease hitchhiked to the United States from Europe and was first identified in Ohio almost a century ago.…

BANZEIRO—this is what the people of the Xingu call places where the river grows savage. Where, if you’re lucky, you can make it through; where, if you’re not, you can’t. It is a place of danger between where you’re coming from and where you want to go. If you’re rowing, you wait for the banzeiro to retract its claws or calm down. And you grow quiet, because your boat might suddenly flip over or get sucked in. You grow quiet so you won’t stir the river’s wrath. There are no synonyms for banzeiro. Nor any translation. Banzeiro is the one that is. And is only where it is. Since I moved to the Amazon in August 2017, the banzeiro has moved from the river to inside me. I don’t have a liver,…

UNTIL THE LATE nineteenth century, lichens were understood as individual organisms. It was then suggested, controversially, that a lichen was, in fact, a partnership. The division between the partners might have been invisible at first, but underneath a microscope, it was plain as day: a lichen was a pact between a fungus and an alga. Scientists began to speak of symbiosis: not survival of the fittest, but cooperation, reciprocity, partnership. In 2016, it was found that in addition to the fungal and the algal partners, a yeast made the duo a trio. Or maybe more: some lichens also seemed to incorporate bacteria, viruses, amoebas, even other microfungi and microalgae. It was a collective whose very inter-activity enabled it to survive conditions that the individual organisms within could never survive on their…