The joy I’d been chasing for years didn’t come from studying turtles, I saw now. It came from falling in love with them. It came from forging passionate bonds I had not in my wildest dreams believed possible. Dropping the privilege and isolation of being a person set above all other beings, I finally re-entered the natural world as just another citizen. I joined a trillion lives all more like my own than different. For a minute more I hung in the water staring at tiny green dots of duck weed, a bristling patch of quill wort, a swirl of turtles below me. Every separate being stood out as if lit from within.
I waded out of the water that afternoon into a far larger world.