Happy New Year, dear reader. By now, you have hopefully heard that this newsletter will soon be released as a hardcover book. With 100 essays reimagined for the state of the world today alongside rich nature photography, The Overview: Meditations on Nature for a World in Transition arrives in just a few weeks (you can pre-order your copy here). Each week leading up to its release, I’ll be taking a closer look at the four central themes it’s organized around, starting with the first chapter: Reverence.

Science and spirituality have been made to live separately, but they are branches from the same tree. Reverence—that sense of unnamable sublimity—is the root from which they both came. When we study life, we see how extraordinarily interlinked it all is, the unseen forces that thread everything together. And so reverence is about more than merely restoring the respect we have so clearly lost for the natural world: it’s about understanding our spiritual relatedness to it. 

In my view, reverence is also about re-enchanting ourselves with the Earth. We live in a place where plants turn light into nutrients, where snakes renew themselves by shedding their skin and bats see by sound. Are these feats really less magical just because science has helped explain them? If we want to devote ourselves to this planet, we can start by opening our eyes. Because the more enchanting we find this world, the more we are moved to protect its many wonders. 

For all that science can enlighten us about the universe, there’s still so much that we have yet to learn. According to NASA, 95% of the universe is dark energy and dark matter—both of which are entirely unknown to us. Part of cultivating reverence is humbling ourselves before such mystery, seeing it too as sacred. While religious parables and spiritual aphorisms often cling to metaphors of light, the dark has just as much to offer, for that is where we find time to dream.

The deeper our sense of reverence for nature goes, the more we start to know it by another name: love. What else but love tethers together two seemingly separate organisms? What else but love causes us to see the world with fresh eyes? What else has eluded scientists and philosophers alike? It is my utmost belief that repairing our wounded relationship with the world will require us to relearn how to love it—including ourselves, each other, and all the species we share it with.

The 25 essays that comprise this first chapter explore each of these threads of reverence, with topics ranging from the spirituality of phototropism and the magic of bioluminescence to the mysteries of the blood and the love of ecological reciprocity. From a personal perspective, I couldn’t think of a more fitting way to start the book than with a word that I have given so much of my life to—and that I have found, time and time again, has given so much back.