Life Windows

Compared to leaves like the maple or oak, pine needles couldn’t be more unimpressive. Yet these humble creations can keep their green, long after other leaves are becoming compost.

The hearty pine survives where no other trees can, because their needles are designed to stand up to all kinds of privation. Since they’re long and thin, […]

When brush fires ravage a tinder-dry landscape, grass is scorched but not destroyed. When droughts kill off other vegetation, grass withers but doesn’t die.

Through the thick and thin of life, grass springs back to life with the next rain, because it grows from ground-level — not from the leaf-tips like other plants.

And rather […]

There’s nothing like a volcanic eruption to transform an idyllic landscape into a barren moonscape.

Yet life quickly launches a comeback. Seeds, riding the winds for hundreds of miles, quickly blanket the wasteland. Before long, life again sprouts from the desolation.

Waist-high triumphal spikes of the fireweed, one of the first plants to rise from the […]

Relative security and regular meals — there’s something to be said for the fishbowl-life.

But then, isn’t life more than just a bowl-to-bowl existence?

Once we sense that there’s a larger dimension to life, our fishbowl-life can quickly become small and confining.

We’re all called to escape the confines of our ego-bowl to surrender ourselves to the greater […]

How can a self-respecting butterfly be proud of her caterpillar off-spring? It bears no family resemblance. And it does nothing but gorge itself on milkweed leaves all day?

The mother Monarch doesn’t give up on her caterpillar-child, even when it attaches itself to a milkweed twig, sheds its outer skin, and shape-shifts into an even less-promising […]