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?

I thought: to be tough is to be fragile; to be tender is to be truly fierce.

Perhaps despair is the only human sin.

Everything in nature invites us constantly to be what we are. We are often like rivers: careless and forceful, timid and dangerous, lucid and muddied, eddying, gleaming, still.

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

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.

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