So, like, i- in the opening lines of your book, you, you write, "As long as I can remember, nature has been my church, the song of every cicada sermon, the shade of every, uh, poplar a pew." Like, a- and I, I kinda feel like in reading the book, I'm reading, like, your diary almost, and it's, it's, it's very personal [laughs] and, you know, how did, how did this journey begin for you? Like, do you have, like, your earliest memory of nature?

Yeah.

Well, um, I mean, true to what I wrote, uh, growing up, I just, nature was always where I found a sense of belonging.

I think that I, I took a lot of comfort in the idea that nothing is really strange in nature.

You know, everything is strange, and so nothing is strange.

Um, and I, I remember being a kid, and I, I convinced my parents to get me an ootheca of praying mantises, and I watched them hatch.

And, you know, when pr- praying mantises hatch, they, they look very much like adult praying mantises.

Um, we talked about how important the human word is, whether written or oral, but did nature help you with something that words couldn't express? Like a feeling that something that you couldn't read, couldn't be told, you had to experience and connect to get the message?

Mm-hmm.

Because it's the thing that keeps...

It, it sustains it, right? We, we, we create this, this binary of life and death, but death is really, it's the energy, it's the stream that keeps life flowing.

And I have a frie- I just wanna shout out my friend, um, John Christian Pfeiffer, who, uh, runs Larkspur, which is this beautiful, if you don't know it, it's beautiful combination conservation site and, um, great natural barrier, burial site.

And they just bury people in the earth.

And this, this tradition is, is rising again in this country as the, like, horrors of understanding the origins of, like, the funeral industry come from, and the fact that we pump our bodies full of chemicals and put ourselves in boxes, um, when in actuality, death is, it's becoming part of everything else again, you know? It's, it's your atoms, it, it's your atoms and stardust and everything else that we borrowed returning and...

But because we don't talk about death, it becomes this terrifying thing.

But, and forgive the, like, silliness, the simplicity of this, like, what do you think the threads are that built the tapestry of who you are? Like, how did you become interested in this? How did you begin to blend together your writing, these interests? Like, how did, how did that come to be for you?