As a waking creature “set down here” on a breathing earth, I often find glimpses of majesty and power in the natural world, where a tree’s bark reminds me to reexamine the texture of language, or the sky heavy with clouds prompts me to consider the weight (or lightness) of each word I use. I first read Annie Dillard at age fourteen, a year after undergoing plastic surgery and immigrating from England to America. Everything was still new to me, including my own face, and Dillard taught me to observe the natural world with curious eyes, searching each detail for hidden meaning. I remember fire-orange bittersweet berries evoking catharsis, a shallow creek’s persistent rushing over pebbles like the passage of time, toppled young pine trees in a forest revealing the aftermath of destruction beyond human grasp. For me, without expeditions into nature, there would be no words. With words, the body I inhabit becomes a tree in a wood, a boulder pressing into earth. Each letter holds the potential to build something new.