We wake, if ever at all, to mystery.

We still and always want waking.

It is difficult to undo our own damage, and to recall to our presence that which we have asked to leave.

I had hopes for my rough edges. I wanted to use them as a can opener, to cut myself a hole in the world's surface and exit through it.

Every live thing is a survivor on a kind of extended emergency bivouac.

There is no such thing as an artist: there is only the world lit or unlit as the light allows. When the candle is burning, who looks at the wick? When the candle is out, who needs it?

The point of going somewhere like the Napo River in Ecuador is not to see the most spectacular anything. It is simply to see what is there.