Yesterday I saw a post from a friend detailing her gratitude and joy about life, her birthday celebration, and her deep despair despite all the good in her life. She threw a lifeline out to the community: if hope was a rope, what would it be?
And boom, the first thought that came to my brain was dinosaurs.
Deep Time, Deep Breath
About a week ago, I streamed the newest iteration of Jurassic World on Netflix. Not because I thought it would be an amazing movie, but because it turns out I just love dinosaurs. Dino movies sucker me in. After that, I stumbled into a documentary series on dinosaurs and their wild resilience on this planet for over 160 million years. They were evolving beasts that lived through two mass extinctions.
Their counterparts, the redwoods, have survived two extinctions too, except I get to live next to these giants every day. The hexaploids, the polyploids, the intuitive little diploids. A haiku might be forming.
My mind began to race through scientific facts: how species like redwoods, bristlecone pines, octopuses, turtles, wheat, and beetles have used evolution in their favor for deep-rooted resilience. I kept thinking: we humans have only been on Earth for just a few moments in earth time. The rivers, trees, oceans, rocks, they’ve been here for hundreds of millions, some even billions, of years.
A 2.5-Mile Walk Through 160 Million Years
Then, in my late-night Googling, I learned that the horseshoe crab and the shark have lived through four mass extinction events. I shot straight up in bed and just went, “wow, wow, wow” at 11:58 p.m. on a school night. If there was ever a moment when I was Bastian in an attic reading The Neverending Story, this was my almost-fifty-year-old self, hooked on the origin story of life.
That’s a lot of time on this wild planet. We humans? We have about 300,000 years. A quick 2.5-mile walk in a redwood canyon near home helps me hold that in my body. I follow a creek in the company of redwoods that have made fairy-circle clones of themselves. These hexaploids are a kind of super genome, a magic miracle of backup copies, ready to self-germinate whenever the need is there. And it’s where I go when I need grounding and wisdom.
Deep time helps me breathe, but it doesn’t erase the feeling that my own body is on the front lines too. A lot of times these days I feel like I am everything everywhere all at once.
Late-Night Questions on a School Night
Recently I quit drinking alcohol. A pseudo-cleanse to calm my nerves, give my body a reset before I hit my 50th birthday, and soothe the peri-menopause bomb cycling through my system. Late-night, sober questions fill my head. Is water women’s health? It feels like a question for the mystery school. But when you break it down, we are mostly made of water, so the scientist in me says: yes, obviously.
Then my brain keeps going: is water a brain? If every form of life we know relies on water, who’s to say it isn’t the real thinker here? Aren’t we just arrangements of water and neurons, atoms and molecules and protons? The periodic table has never been so interesting, and chemistry is at the heart of it all.
Just as I’m about to pull away from my chatbot, I remember cyanobacteria. Those tiny blue-green overachievers — among the first organisms to perform oxygenic photosynthesis more than 2 billion years ago — are life’s original plot twist. They started pumping oxygen into the atmosphere, changing the chemistry of the whole planet, and accidentally made it habitable for complex life. Like us. And all our internet of things.
One microscopic lineage creating a chain reaction: plant life erupting from the ground, making its own food through photosynthesis magic, and then the chain grew — water cycles, plants, and eventually alive, walking species.
Is a river alive? Robert Macfarlane thought that question was worth an entire book. I read it as a page-turner while my estrogen bounced and my body recovered, meeting many new kindred spirits, Rita and the Mutehekau Sipu river, Giuliana and her fungi, the cedars in the cloud forest, Yuvan and Ennore Creek and the turtles, even if they don’t yet know me back. In Ecuador, in New Zealand, in Channi, and in other places around the world, rivers and forests are not just metaphors; they are recognized as alive and protected, with legal rights written into constitutions and court decisions. Amen.
That same alive-ness hums right outside my door. I live in what might be the world’s best botanical garden: the East Bay hills of San Francisco.
My Extended Backyard
Every neighbor compliments the next, trees, flowers, lemons, apples, limes, spilling over fences. They treat their private property like the family and friends they want to keep bringing back, feeding them, talking to them, watching them thrive. Our public parks like Joaquin Miller or Redwood Regional carry that same spirit of care and mutual support, only it runs wilder with fewer fences.
And the wildlife? Red-tailed hawks and ravens, hummingbirds, monarch butterflies, salamanders, mountain lions, coyotes, lizards, and snakes are all observed as I walk the trails. Whales, dolphins, seals, sea lions, cormorants, even great whites are all spotted from a 30 foot sailing boat that I captain in the bay. All this abundance lives in what I call my “extended” backyard. I may be the only human in this geography of landscape through this metropolis of 30 million, but I am never walking alone. It is my most important medicine, and it is what I keep reaching for when the rope feels like it’s fraying.
And right now, it is fraying.
Mad Kings and the Main Line
Twelve days into the war in Iran. Ukraine continues. Gaza is in full annihilation. Human leaders making decisions to press a button and say yes, and I hate that this is not some imaginative Game of Thrones fantasy, but reality. Mad kings, actual ones, running the show. And the destruction isn’t just human, it’s ecological. The climate technologists are so hyper focused on carbon emissions and energy and yet there seems to be a bigger fire to put out. It is Ecocide alongside genocide. Species extinction, nature breaking down, authoritarianism rising.
It’s hard to hold the main line, just like sailing in 25–30 knot winds in the bay when you have taken down the jib sail and reefed the main two times. Rough seas demand all hands on deck to find safe harbour.
And while I organize and problem-solve, here I am. Still asking questions.
What is resilience if we see it as a mirror? What would we see there? The word itself is packed so heavy with context that we all stumble trying to define it.
When I look in the mirror, I think: my God, I am here because my ancestors survived. My brown eyes, my dry skin, my wisdom teeth, my ovaries, my arched feet. I already am a resilience story. And I—like all my nature friends—have a series of levers in my genome, my 46 chromosomes, that flip on to help me face whatever future comes.
Resilience as a Design Tool
But is resilience just survival? Or is it the life experience too, the wisdoms and learnings and failures, the adaptations I’ve made, just like the bristlecone pine, ferns, and moss that don’t just persist but quietly reshape the world around them?
You see, resilience is a design tool. We can use the wisdom we learn to better adapt, survive, and thrive. Biomimicry does exactly this. What life hacks can we borrow by studying nature, our invisible wise oracle from the natural matrix? How might we design our lives to stay connected to life on Earth—mutually supported, lifting up vibrancy and superpowers as our model? What will we copy? What will we turn on or off as we design, problem-solve, and learn to hear communication that’s not in our language? When I think in terms of the long arc, my mind finally settles. Making my bed every morning reminds me I still have agency.
As Carl Sagan liked to point out, if you compressed Earth’s history into a 24-hour clock, humans have only been around for the last 77 seconds. That perspective rolls the stress right off my back.
We have all the know-how to redesign Earth without the destruction we’re seeing daily—the science is there. What collides with it are the usual suspects: greed, power, and extreme ignorance dressed up in ties and glued to their cellphones.
Jane Goodall said near the end of her life: you cannot change minds with data; you can only change hearts with story. Story is the activator. Once hearts move, data and science can buoy the action, giving it clarity and staying power.
Picking Up the Rope
This moves us toward purpose. Purpose answers the so-what, the what-now, the what-next. And in this long arc of deep time, the purpose looks like picking up the rope together, dinosaurs and hexaploids and rivers and redwoods and yes, octopuses, showing us how it’s done for 160 million years.
My Octopus Teacher, the documentary about a man and his relationship with an octopus, intimately showed how this marine creature (that we humans know very little about) works through problem solving, agility, superpowers like changing color, growing cut off limbs, improvisational, multi tasking in all areas with different arms, and metamorphosing into different shapes to camouflage. But most importantly, there was a deep empathy and compassion between the octopus and their human friend. You could feel it. This feeling is what I connect to when I have agency, that I care about the life that has no human voice, that is left out of our intellectual conversations as an after thought. And so this is the load I carry when I travel amongst my friends, both humans and non humans.
When future geologists look back on this moment, they’ll say: what a strange species. Messy, dangerous, funny, sad, and beautiful. It sure looked like they may not make the climb on that rope, so many sketchy moments, and then, wowser, they landed on the plateau.
Life continued. We evolved.
Woo hoo.