If anything is endemic to Wyoming it is wind. This big room of space is swept out daily, leaving a bone yard of fossils, agates, and carcasses in every stage of decay. Though it was water that initially shaped the state, wind is the meticulous gardener, raising dust and pruning the sage.

Islands are reminders of arrivals and departures.

Animals give us their constant, unjaded faces, and we burden them with our bodies and civilized ordeals.

It's no wonder human beings are so narcissistic. The way our ears are constructed, we can hear only what is right next to us or else the internal monologue inside.

A tree is an aerial garden, a botanical migration from the sea, from those earliest plants, the seaweeds; it is a purchase on crumbled rock, on ground. The human, standing, is only a different upsweep and articulation of cells. How treelike we are, how human the tree.

I designed furniture that pulled apart, folded, and broke down into neat stacks. Since arriving in California, I had moved four times and it looked as if I would move again. Was it the land running under my feet or my feet running over the land?

Finally, the lessons of impermanence taught me this: loss constitutes an odd kind of fullness; despair empties out into an unquenchable appetite for life.