Love life first, then march through the gates of each season; go inside nature and develop the discipline to stop destructive behavior; learn tenderness toward experience, then make decisions based on creating biological wealth that includes all people, animals, cultures, currencies, languages, and the living things as yet undiscovered; listen to the truth the land will tell you; act accordingly.

As fog moved to the mainland I heard a flock of birds fly over. They sounded like a dress rustling, a dress being unfastened and dropping to the floor. Fog came unpinned like hair. On the beach cliffs, great colonies of datura - jimson weed - with their white trumpet flowers, looked like brass bands.

What Flaubert refers to as the “mélancholies du voyage” is like the sadness I feel as one season departs and another arrives.

I like to think of the landscape not as a fixed place but as a path that is unwinding before my eyes, under my feet. To see and know a place is a contemplative act. It means emptying our minds and letting what is there, in all its mulitplicity and endless variety, come in.

Leaves are verbs that conjugate the seasons.

I like big, open, spare landscapes. There's lots of room. Nobody bothers you... I feel as if I can think there.

Am I like the optimist who, while falling ten stories from a building, says at each story, I'm all right so far?