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61ae1f2
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If you took the monsters' point of view, everything they did made perfect sense. The trick was learning to think like a monster.
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Sy Montgomery |
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d7e81ae
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I never met a pig I didn't like. pigs are intelligent, emotional, and sensitive souls. They love company. They crave contact and comfort. Pigs have a delightful sense of mischief; most of them seem to enjoy a good joke and appreciate music. And that is something you would certainly never suspect from your relationship with a pork chop.
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humor
pigs
sy-mongomery
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Sy Montgomery |
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1d0283e
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I've always harbored a fondness for monsters. Even as a child, I had rooted for Godzilla and King Kong instead of for the people trying to kill them. It had seemed to me that these monsters' irritation was perfectly reasonable. Nobody likes to be awakened from slumber by a nuclear explosion, so it was no wonder to me Godzilla was crabby; as for King Kong, few men would blame him for his attraction to pretty Fay Wray. (Though her screaming w..
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Sy Montgomery |
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b18a85a
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A lion is a mammal like us; an octopus is put together completely differently, with three hearts, a brain that wraps around its throat, and a covering of slime instead of hair. Even their blood is a different color from ours; it's blue, because copper, not iron, carries its oxygen.
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Sy Montgomery |
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a89ae43
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The self," Blackmore writes, "is just a fleeting impression that arises with each experience and fades away again. . . . There is no inner self," she argues, "only multiple parallel processes that give rise to a benign inner delusion--a useful fiction." She argues that consciousness itself is a fiction."
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Sy Montgomery |
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d63e892
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Humans have always exalted dreams. Pindar of Thebes, the Greek lyric poet, suggested that the soul is more active while dreaming than while awake. He believed that during a dream, the awakened soul may see the future, "an award of joy or sorrow drawing near." So it's no wonder that humans were quick to reserve dreams for people alone; researchers for many years claimed dreams were a property of "higher" minds. But any pet owner who has hear..
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Sy Montgomery |
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65bf76a
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In her memoir of living among the Bushmen, The Old Way: A Story of the First People, my friend Liz lovingly invokes an image first coined by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins: "You are standing beside your mother, holding her hand. She is holding her mother's hand, who is holding her mother's hand. . . . " Eventually the line stretches three hundred miles long and goes back five million years, and the clasping hand of the ancestor look..
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Sy Montgomery |
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bc28442
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Just about every animal," Scott says--not just mammals and birds--"can learn, recognize individuals, and respond to empathy."
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Sy Montgomery |
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4a70838
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In her memoir of living among the Bushmen, The Old Way: A Story of the First People, my friend Liz lovingly invokes an image first coined by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins: "You are standing beside your mother, holding her hand. She is holding her mother's hand, who is holding her mother's hand. . . . " Eventually the line stretches three hundred miles long and goes back five million years, and the clasping hand of the ancestor look..
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Sy Montgomery |
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d1c6177
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Volumes of history written in the ancient alphabet of G and C, A and T.
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Sy Montgomery |
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dd7c42b
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She's looking right at you," Scott says. As I hold her glittering gaze, I instinctively reach to touch her head. "As supple as leather, as tough as steel, as cold as night," Hugo wrote of the octopus's flesh; but to my surprise, her head is silky and softer than custard. Her skin is flecked with ruby and silver, a night sky reflected on the wine-dark sea. As I stroke her with my fingertips, her skin goes white beneath my touch. White is the..
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Sy Montgomery |
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fa59b54
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Hormones and neurotransmitters, the chemicals associated with human desire, fear, love, joy, and sadness, "are highly conserved across taxa," Jennifer said. This means that whether you're a person or a monkey, a bird or a turtle, an octopus or a clam, the physiological changes that accompany our deepest-felt emotions appear to be the same. Even a brainless scallop's little heart beats faster when the mollusk is approached by a predator, jus..
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Sy Montgomery |
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ccfe895
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Here is an animal with venom like a snake, a beak like a parrot, and ink like an old-fashioned pen. It can weigh as much as a man and stretch as long as a car, yet it can pour its baggy, boneless body through an opening the size of an orange. It can change color and shape. It can taste with its skin. Most fascinating of all, I had read that octopuses are smart.
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Sy Montgomery |
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5529994
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Octopus slime is sort of a cross between drool and snot. But in a nice way. And it's very useful. It helps to be slippery if you're squeezing your body in and out of tight places. Slime keeps the octopus moist if it wants to emerge from the water, which some species of octopus do with surprisingly frequency in the wild.
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Sy Montgomery |
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39a4ce4
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Knowing someone who belongs to another species can enlarge your soul in surprising ways.
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learning
inspirational
self-growth
species
soul
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Sy Montgomery |
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2267aec
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Most animals on this planet live in the ocean. And most of them are invertebrates.
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Sy Montgomery |
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5523976
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Just about every animal," Scott says--not just mammals and birds--"can learn, recognize individuals, and respond to empathy." Once you find the right way to work with an animal, be it an octopus or an anaconda, together, you can accomplish what even Saint Francis might have considered a miracle."
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Sy Montgomery |
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b39fcc3
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But what is the soul? Some say it is the self, the "I" that inhabits the body; without the soul, the body is like a lightbulb with no electricity. But it is more than the engine of life, say others; it is what gives life meaning and purpose. Soul is the fingerprint of God."
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Sy Montgomery |
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50a4426
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reverie. To share such a moment of deep tranquility with another being, especially one as different from us as the octopus, is a humbling privilege.
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Sy Montgomery |
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aa77682
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The idea of universal consciousness suffuses both Western and Eastern thought and philosophy, from the "collective unconscious" of psychologist Carl Jung, to unified field theory, to the investigations of the Institute of Noetic Sciences founded by Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell in 1973. Though some of the Methodist ministers of my youth might be appalled, I feel blessed by the thought of sharing with an octopus what one website (lovean..
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Sy Montgomery |
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f0c4ff7
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Adult gorillas will fight to the death defending their families. This is why poachers who may be seeking only one infant for the zoo trade must often kill all the adults in the family to capture the baby.
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Sy Montgomery |
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060720a
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At the Seattle Aquarium, Sammy the giant Pacific octopus enjoyed playing with a baseball-size plastic ball that could be screwed together by twisting the two halves. A staffer put food inside the ball but later was surprised to find that not only had the octopus opened the ball, it had screwed it back together when it was done.
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Sy Montgomery |
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63202d7
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A giant Pacific octopus--the largest of the world's 250 or so octopus species--can easily overpower a person. Just one of a big male's three-inch-diameter suckers can lift 30 pounds, and a giant Pacific octopus has 1,600 of them. An octopus bite can inject a neurotoxic venom as well as saliva that has the ability to dissolve flesh. Worst of all, an octopus can take the opportunity to escape from an open tank, and an escaped octopus is a big..
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Sy Montgomery |
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a515a8b
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I am still learning how to be a good creature. Though I try earnestly, I often fail. But I am having a great life trying...
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inspirational
self-growth
love-of-animals
how-to-be-a-good-creature
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Sy Montgomery |
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ffa16de
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The study of a language . . . allows its students to hear a people's 'interpretation (or misinterpretation) of messages from environment to human.' The spoken word reveals, upon reflection, that to which its speakers first chose to listen, then ponder, then live by.
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Sy Montgomery |
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699d74b
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But Wilson was ahead of the curve. Long before the first octopus-enrichment handbook was published, many octopuses ago, he set out to create a safe toy worthy of an octopus's intellect. Working at his lab at Arthur D. Little Corp., Wilson devised a series of three clear Plexiglas cubes with different locks. The smallest of the three has a sliding latch that twists to lock down, like the bolt on a horse's stall. You can put a live crab--a fa..
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Sy Montgomery |
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9ede179
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The sight of a slender young woman sitting in the anaconda exhibit with a 13-foot-long, predatory reptile snuggling in her lap, the tip of a tail coiled lovingly around one leg, provided dramatic evidence of what Scott and Wilson already knew: "Just about every animal," Scott says--not just mammals and birds--"can learn, recognize individuals, and respond to empathy." Once"
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Sy Montgomery |
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820b0fd
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There is another important difference as well. Human eyes have three visual pigments, allowing us to see color. Octopuses have only one--which would make these masters of camouflage, commanding a glittering rainbow of colors, technically color-blind. How, then, does the octopus decide what colors to turn? New evidence suggests cephalopods might be able to see with their skin.
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Sy Montgomery |
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789b307
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But perhaps, in a world "older and more complete" than ours, there is a love that does not demand a reciprocal debt of need."
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Sy Montgomery |
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627429c
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Had a person attempted to taste me so soon after we met, I would have been alarmed; but since Athena was an octopus, I was thrilled. Although we couldn't have been more different -- I, a terrestrial vertebrate constrained by joints and bound to air; she, a marine mollusk with not a single bone, who breathed water -- she was clearly as curious about me as I was about her.
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mollusks
octopus
taste
curiosity
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Sy Montgomery |
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57f5917
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The word compassion means "with suffering." To have compassion is to willingly join in suffering--to show those you love that you will not let them suffer"
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Sy Montgomery |
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f5cbec9
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Wholeness feels like gratitude. Gratitude that we are safe and happy and together.
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Sy Montgomery |
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386e371
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at California's Monterey Bay Aquarium found a banana peel on the floor in front of the Shale Reef exhibit at 3 a.m. On closer inspection, the banana peel turned out to be a healthy, fist-size red octopus. The security officer followed the wet slime trail and replaced the octopus in the exhibit it had come from. But here's the shocking part: The aquarium didn't know it had a red octopus living in its Shale Reef exhibit. Apparently the octopu..
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Sy Montgomery |
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104eec4
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Bear-time seems slow to us, perhaps, because we do not have the patience for such a life.
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Sy Montgomery |
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ce77316
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Perhaps an even more surprising case was reported in June 2012, when a security officer at California's Monterey Bay Aquarium found a banana peel on the floor in front of the Shale Reef exhibit at 3 a.m. On closer inspection, the banana peel turned out to be a healthy, fist-size red octopus. The security officer followed the wet slime trail and replaced the octopus in the exhibit it had come from. But here's the shocking part: The aquarium ..
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Sy Montgomery |
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82d5480
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Not to hurt our humble brethren is our first duty to them, but to stop there is not enough. We have a higher mission: to be of service to them whenever they require it.
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Sy Montgomery |
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a77cc89
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Unlike the supply of dogs, the supply of good names isn't limitless.
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Sy Montgomery |
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b5863bd
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Cambodia is the most heavily mined country on earth, with 4 to 8 million land mines, according to one estimate.
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Sy Montgomery |
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7846041
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The ability to ascribe thoughts to others, thoughts that might differ from our own, is a sophisticated cognitive skill, known as "theory of mind."
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Sy Montgomery |
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bce5ff4
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The ocean, for me, is what LSD was to Timothy Leary. He claimed the hallucinogen is to reality what a microscope is to biology, affording a perception of reality that was not before accessible. Shamans and seekers eat mushrooms, drink potions, lick toads, inhale smoke, and snort snuff to transport their minds to realms they cannot normally experience. (Humans are not alone in this endeavor; species from elephants to monkeys purposely eat fe..
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Sy Montgomery |
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5af23f4
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I often wish I could go back in time and tell my young, anxious self that my dreams weren't in vain and my sorrows weren't permanent. I can't do that, but I can do something better. I can tell you that teachers are all around to help you; with four legs or two or eight or even none; some with internal skeletons, some without. All you have to do is recognize them as teachers and be ready to hear their truths.
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learning
inspirational
self-growth
how-to-be-a-good-creature
love-for-animals
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Sy Montgomery |
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a017158
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There was a tank of special flounder about fifteen feet away from the octopus tank," he said. The fish were part of a study. But to the researchers' dismay, the flounder started disappearing, one by one. One day they caught the culprit red-handed. The octopus had been slipping out of her tank and eating the flounder! When the octopus was discovered, Scott said, "she gave a guilty, sideways look and slithered away."
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Sy Montgomery |
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e191a5d
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Water temperatures in this range do, in fact, cause physiological changes--one of which is known as the cold-shock response, a "series of reflexes that begin immediately upon sudden cooling of the skin following cold-water immersion." During this reflexive response, "blood pressure, heart rate, and the workload of the heart all increase, making the heart more susceptible to life-threatening rhythms and heart attack. Simultaneously," an onli..
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Sy Montgomery |
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7b001ec
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Isn't this what we want to know about those whom we care about? What is it like, we wonder at each meeting, in shared meals and secrets and silences, with each touch and glance, to be you?
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knowing
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Sy Montgomery |