All Is Leaf

Book excerpt: Drawing inspiration and urgency from the storied Goethe Oak tree at Buchenwald concentration camp--and from the leaf as symbol of all change, growth, and renewal--award-winning essayist John Price explores a multitude of dramatic transformations, in his life and in the fragile world beyond: "the how of the organism--that keeps your humanity alive." From his Iowa backyard to the edge of the Arctic Circle, from the forgotten recesses of the body to the far reaches of the solar system, this book demonstrates the ways imagination and informed compassion can, as Price describes it, expand thousandfold the boundaries of what we might "have naïvely considered an individual self."