Tangerine Meditation: Thich Nhat Hahn’s Simple, Profound Mindfulness Practice to Magnify Your Capacity for Joy

How to see the universe in a small orange orb.

My poet friend Marie Howe gives the students in her ecopoetry class a lovely assignment: At the outset of the semester, each young poet is asked to name the animal they find most repulsive, then to learn everything they can about it — scientifically, historically, culturally. By the conclusion of the course, they have to write a poem about it.

Inevitably, the creatures previously regarded as remote and abstract othernesses, caricatured by a few l...