You may know this is the Year of the Dragon. Not attentive to the Chinese zodiac, I wasn’t aware of it until a couple of weeks ago. Now old memories surface. Savoring dragon imagery in North American Chinatowns. Playing Dungeons and Dragons with old-fashioned graph paper and pencil. Watching dragonflies hover above the pond, and dragon kites soar into the sky. Singing “Puff, the Magic Dragon” by the campfire. Reading tales of King Arthur, son of Uther Pendragon.

In general, a dragon (from Greek drakon and Latin draco, “large serpent”) is a giant, mythical reptile with long sharp claws and fangs, four legs, a long tail, often with wings and horns and fiery breath. Comprising all the traits of great predators built onto an enormous serpent, it was powerful enough to give protection (as in China and Wales), threaten enemies (as on the bow of Viking ships), or devastate the countryside until slain by Saint George or some other valiant hero.

The puzzle about dragons, to me, is why such similar scaled beasts took shape in so many disconnected parts of the globe—including places that don’t have crocodiles, iguanas, or traces of Tyrannosaurus Rex. There are theories but no consensus. One that intrigues me lies in the human genome. Although people of many lands faced more danger from bears than snakes, the opposite was true in Africa where their early ancestors evolved. Fear of snakes (and spiders, and heights) promoted survival. Like monkeys, humans are born with an instinctive fear of snakes. Small wonder such fear became the basis for fantastical super-predators around the world.

​Images (all cropped): (left) Aztec era stone sculpture of feathered serpent, National Museum of Anthropology, Mexico City; (middle) Drawing from original gypsum bas-relief, from beside door in Babylonian temple, now in British Museum; (right) Carving on choir stalls in Chester Cathedral, England, 1380.

Age-old tradition treats reason and emotion as opposites. Whether in balance or in tension, they get paired with other dualisms: masculine and feminine, sun and moon, yang and yin, sophisticated and primitive, left brain and right brain. René Descartes famously wrote, “I think, therefore I am.” But if you only think, without also feeling, decisions are impossible. Logic may explain how to pursue a goal, but it can’t discern which goal to pursue. Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio says, “It is emotion that allows you to mark things as good, bad, or indifferent.”

Damasio calls emotions an integrated set of rapid bodily changes that evolved for survival in response to danger or opportunity. In front of a charging tiger or truck, our bodies prepare to fight or flee. Our muscles tense, our pulse and blood pressure rise, our pupils dilate, our breath becomes rapid, all before our brains can formulate that we’re afraid. Later, as time allows, we can reason whether the danger is real or whether a reward is worth the risk.

“Life is not a series of calculus problems. Life is about movement,” New York Times columnist David Brooks writes. “Emotions guide the navigation system.” To teach children the alphabet but ignore story characters’ motives misses the boat. To estimate potential based on test scores alone is to overlook emotional judgment. To build a machine that processes data a zillion times faster than humans doesn’t mean it will replace us. To pit reason against feeling is self-defeating. We need both, working in tandem.

​Images: Symbols of reason and emotion.

Late one summer evening decades ago, at a family camp after the children were asleep, a dozen adult campers went skinny-dipping off the dock. Happier near water than in it, I sat on the dock, leaning against a post, drifting in and out, soaking up the voices and the warm night air. At peace with the world.

The next morning one of the swimmers accosted me. “How dare you sit in judgment on us? Who do you think you are, disapproval written all over your face?” Huh? What’s the self-defense for seeming to show an attitude so different from what you were feeling?

Humans have this precious, inborn capacity to perceive what other people are feeling. As with other skills, it’s on a spectrum. Along with being somewhat face blind, I suspect I’m below average on this. Others grasp friends’ unspoken thoughts with near-perfect empathy or see with confidence when someone is lying.

And still other people go overboard, reading more into a facial expression or a casual gesture than is actually there. Please, before you decide my blank face means I feel grumpy or resentful or bored, go ahead and ask. And please, have the courtesy to believe my answer.

Image: Wikipedia, “Faces.” What are these two thinking?

Building a climate-resilient polio-free world is a technical brief issued last month by the World Health Organization on behalf of the Global Polio Eradication Initiative. Having been involved with polio eradication for forty-odd years, I wondered what a public health perspective might add to the daily headlines of heatwaves, floods, droughts, and storms.

Case in point: Pakistan. In 2022, warming air and ocean set off a sequence of drought, record-breaking monsoon rains, and meltwater from Himalayan glaciers. Catastrophic floods from May to October displaced nearly eight million people. At the peak, almost a third of the country was under water. Roads, bridges, and entire villages were destroyed. In the health sector:

• Masses of people wading through wastewater spread cholera and polio.
• Nearly 1,500 health facilities were devastated and nonfunctional.
• Displaced health workers couldn’t get vaccines or medicines to their patients.
• Destruction of crops and livestock created a severe food shortage.

Globally, rising temperatures are expected to cause a quarter million deaths a year between 2030 and 2050 from malnutrition, malaria, diarrhea, dengue, and heat stress. Longer, hotter summers mean more disease-bearing mosquitoes, which kill more humans than does any other animal. I tend to think of health and climate as two important but mostly unrelated issues. Not so.

Image: Cattail Mosquito (Coquillettidia perturbans), widespread carrier of West Nile virus and other diseases. Photo by David McCorquodale.

Words shift meaning. Some, like Methodist and queer, start as slurs and later get adopted by the groups they concern. Some, such as silly, sink from positive to pejorative. By the time I heard woke as an adjective within the past decade, its senses had expanded from neutral to cautionary, admiring, mistakenly-would-be supportive, or insulting, depending on who’s saying it and why.

Woke has long been a literal form of awake in African American vernacular. By the 1930s, stay woke was also a metaphor for remaining vigilant and alert. Singer-songwriter Lead Belly used the term after recording a song about the Scottsboro Boys, a group of Black teens wrongly convicted of raping white women. You’ve got to be a little careful when you go down South, he told a radio interviewer. “Stay woke. Keep your eyes open.”

Staying woke broadened to mean challenging systems of racial injustice. In 1940, after Black coal miners in West Virginia went on strike for pay equal to that of whites, a Black union leader said, “We were asleep. But we will stay woke from now on.” Not until decades later did I encounter woke in mainstream media. It burst into public awareness with the Black Lives Matter movement after the fatal police shooting of Michael Brown in 2014. Merriam-Webster added woke to its dictionary in 2017 as U.S. slang for “aware of and actively attentive to important facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justice).”

Perhaps inevitably, some whites coopted woke for their own purposes, twisting its connotations in the process. Opponents may use it to attack progressive ideas in general or to issue a racist dog whistle. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis said, “We will never, ever surrender to the woke mob. Florida is where woke goes to die.” Aspiring allies may mistakenly appropriate this adjective born of specifically Black experience. As a white woman, I have never felt truly threatened when pulling out my cell phone or stopped for speeding. When police questioned my kids for riding bikes after curfew, I never feared they wouldn’t come home alive. I’ll strive to honor woke but I’ll never claim it for myself.

​Images: (left) singer-songwriter Lead Belly; (right) then-Congresswoman Marcia Fudge of Ohio, 2018.

“Unity” is right up there with “thoughts and prayers” in public discourse. I haven’t heard anyone praise today’s polarization, which defines anyone who differs from us as the enemy. We yearn to come together as ___ (Americans? members of a faith or party? humans?). A wish for unity seems the one point on which we all agree. Or do we?

Unity can mean suppressing or excluding anyone who thinks, looks, or acts differently from the norm. Then again, unity can mean making a tent big enough to welcome every speech or action, however dangerous to everyone else. Between the extremes, unity can mean broad inclusion within the limits of safety for the community as a whole. This last form holds great appeal till you ask how and where to draw those limits. Then rancor returns with a vengeance.

Medieval inquisitors burned heretics at the stake to thwart the danger of spreading their heresy, leading others to eternal damnation. England’s first Queen Elizabeth didn’t care what people believed so long as they followed the outward Anglican forms, as a bulwark against Spanish agents plotting to restore Catholicism by force. U.S. Senator Joe McCarthy raised fears of communist infiltration to a fever pitch in the 1950s, destroying some Americans’ lives and threatening others. One person’s freedom is another’s mortal danger.

How can we work toward greater unity without denying our values and experiences? How can we tone down the rhetoric without dismissing dangers we perceive as real? I don’t have the answers. A first step might be to reframe those with whom we disagree, however vehemently, as neighbors rather than enemies.

Image: Original broadside printing of the United States Constitution by Dunlap & Claypoole, 1787.

My belief in mind-body dualism ended in a doctor’s office one day in my 20s. After a routine allergy shot, my arm unexpectedly swelled and turned red. They gave me a shot of adrenalin and had me stay till the reaction subsided. While I waited, my mind went into semi-panic, as if my final exams were tomorrow and I hadn’t begun to study. Knowing that the adrenalin gave my feelings a purely physical cause didn’t calm me. Mind and body were inseparable.

“It’s all in your head” implies your idea isn’t real. But if mind and body are one, isn’t your brain where all your ideas exist, I wondered? It’s all in our heads. That’s where experience happens. The physical world outside us is knowable only through what our senses pass on to the brain. And in a world where dogs hear whistles inaudible to us, and most birds can see ultraviolet light we can’t, why assume human perceptions are the best match for what’s out there?

My thoughts evolved further when my optometrist told me recently that glaucoma could advance a lot before I noticed any loss of vision. I asked what I’d see in the blank where the vision is gone. “Oh, your mind just makes it up,” she said. It turns out many gaps in sensory input get filled with the brain’s best guess. Happily, most brains manage amazingly sound guesswork most of the time. “All in your head” is a pretty good place to explore the reality of ourselves and our world.

Image: Allergy shot such as the one that triggered my long-ago reaction. United States Air Force, 2015.
​

I believe in magic. How could you not, when flickering sparks dot the evening air and tiny helicopters hover above the beebalm? Of course, firefly and hummingbird behaviors have rational explanations. Their magic lies not in science but in how they defy our intuitions of how the natural world works. Knowing my intuition can err doesn’t stop me from gazing in wonder, often for minutes at a stretch.

Now you see it, now you don’t. A spot glows above the grass for a fraction of a second, then another across the way. Don’t blink or you’ll miss it. John Ruskin writes of an evening in Italy, “[T]he fireflies among the scented thickets shone fitfully in the still undarkened air. How they shone! moving like fine-broken starlight through the purple leaves.” Irish poet Frank Ormsby queries “their quick flare of promise and disappointment.” Might they be saying “That any antic spark cruising the void might titillate creation?”
​
Hummingbirds share that fleeting quality Emily Dickinson calls evanescence. For every hummingbird I can watch approach or leave a flower, another seems to materialize out of the blue, hover at the bloom, and vanish. Robert Frost delights in the unexpected: “And make us happy in the darting bird / That suddenly above the bees is heard, / The meteor that thrusts in with needle bill, / And off a blossom in mid air stands still.” Joy, surprise, amazement. Magic.

Images: (left) Fireflies in the forest near Nuremberg, Germany, exposure time 30 sec.; (right) Female ruby-throated hummingbird sipping nectar from scarlet beebalm, photographer Joe Schneid, Louisville, Kentucky.

Bittersweet, isn’t it, how summer has barely begun before daylight starts to recede? In truth, unlike winter, I scarcely notice the changing hour of sunrise or sunset. My memories of childhood summers are of one long, undifferentiated season of glorious sunshine outdoors. Logic says I had to be aware of rainy days and time indoors, but the gradual darkening from June through August escaped my attention.

As an older adult, I watch sub-seasonal changes more closely. New perennials constantly come into bloom; in one friend’s words, it’s like Christmas every day. Flying insects bite in June. Ragweed pollen triggers allergies in August. My childhood memories associate sneezes more with going back to school in the fall.

​Sub-seasonal changes in fauna and flora likely involve light as well as moisture, temperature, and who knows what else. Still, shorter days are among the shifts I notice least. That’s not a complaint. There’s a reason the winter solstice gets more attention than the summer one. As one who prefers light over darkness, in winter I need every reminder of hope that comes with the return of the sun. In summer, the future can wait. I’ll relish all the joy that’s on offer right now. 

Have you ever tried to justify your taste to others who challenge it? To argue the strengths of a particular movie or restaurant to someone who asks, “Why would you want to see that?” “How could you ever eat there?” Samantha Irby’s “I Like It!” in her essay collection Quietly Hostile (Random House, 2023) rings true to my experience. I'd get defensive when friends told me they liked every kind of music except country, a genre I enjoyed. I'd argue why I drove a novel route instead of the usual, faster one.

Unless you’re an acquisitions editor or a landscape architect looking at practical consequences, it isn’t worth the tension. No need to explain or make excuses. No need to prove your sophistication. Irby says “I like it!” is enough, complete with exclamation point.

Walking an unfamiliar business district with a friend, hungry for our first meal of the day, I pointed to the International House of Pancakes across the street. My companion scowled and said, “Let’s keep looking.” Suspecting unfounded prejudice, I asked, “When did you last eat at an IHOP?” The answer: Not for years.

I now regret my response. Feeling put down for my breakfast preference, I unconsciously tried to put my friend on the defensive in return. We could have agreed on a restaurant without debating our difference in tastes. “I don’t like it” is just as valid as “I like it.”

Image: Looking west down Route 66, Williams, Arizona. Photo by Steven C. Price, 2015.