How can you NOT believe in God when octopuses dream and otters have a favorite rock they carry around in a little skin pocket and cows have best friends and bees are out there communicating the coordinates of flowers through dancing and they have regional dialects? Cats are purring at frequencies associated with bone healing? Forests get absolutely incinerated and respond by growing flowers? Dolphins literally invent names for themselves and yell them across the ocean? Penguins are waddling around Antarctica looking for the perfect rock to give their partner? CROWS REMEMBER YOUR FACE. THEY TELL OTHER CROWS ABOUT YOU. THEY TELL THEIR CHILDREN ABOUT YOU. YOU CAN HAVE GENERATIONAL BEEF WITH A BIRD. I NEED YOU TO UNDERSTAND THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THIS. Goats have accents. Rats laugh when you tickle them. Elephants mourn their dead. Whales make songs and then OTHER WHALES LEARN THE SONG and suddenly everybody across the ocean is singing the new song. Monarch butterflies are born knowing how to fly thousands of miles to a place they have never been. Sea turtles hatch out of an egg, immediately sprint toward an ocean that they have never seen, disappear into it for like 3 decades and then somehow come back to the same beach they hatched on. Birds can see colors that we humans can’t see. There are colors out there right now that we don’t even get to know about. There are sea slugs that eat algae and use the chloroplast/chlorophyll and then are just like…photosynthesizing. And they’re super adorable. There are mushrooms communicating underground. There are seeds sitting in the dirt for decades like “no actually I will wait. It’s fine.” Squirrels plant trees because they forget where they put their snacks. Relatable. A CATERPILLAR GOES INTO A LITTLE BAG THAT IT CREATES ITSELF AND DISSOLVES MOST OF ITS BODY INTO ORGANIC GOO AND REARRANGES ITSELF, GROWS WINGS AND THEN LEAVES. WHY IS THIS NOT MORE BEAUTIFULLY TERRIFYING TO PEOPLE?? And you’re telling me a tiny acorn knows how to become a huge tree? It just has a blueprint inside itself? Your body started as ONE CELL. ONE. And that cell divided itself into a brain that can think about its own existence and eyes that can look at stars and hands that can hold somebody else’s hands and a heart that runs on electricity without you even asking it to? The iron in our blood was made inside a star?? We are walking around on a wet rock covered in bioluminescent oceans and singing whales and laughing rats and birds holding lifelong grudges and flowers exploding out of fire and somehow we’re supposed to act like this is a normal place to live? We’re supposed to act like this is all just a random, accidental sequence of events?

One of the most horrific stories I’ve ever reported was published this weekend. Please, everyone privileged in this world, read it and really think about what it means not to have freedom of travel. irishtimes.com/life-style/pe…