In 1928, naturalist Henry Beston wrote:
“We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. … In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with the extension of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear.” In the intervening years since Beston wrote the Outermost house, we realize the prescience and wisdom of his words in a growing abundance of anecdotes and a synthesis of hard sciences from genetics to evolutionary development to astro-biology. The diamond idea: All living creatures embed, to various degrees, the essential genetic code, physical structures and ingredients for attributes we once mistook as purely and only human: sentience, consciousness, emotion; capacities for fear, curiosity, courage, pain, joy, sadness; capacity for relationship. Please enjoy my photographs and thoughts as a humble celebration of such essences binding us to our planet and to our many diverse kin – whether borne of water, land, or air – into one single grand story. This is a story of mind-bending beauty, whose most profound interconnectedness we have only just begun to discover.
