All through autumn we hear a double voice: one says everything is ripe; the other says everything is dying. The paradox is exquisite. We feel what the Japanese call "aware"--an almost untranslatable word meaning something like "beauty tinged with sadness.

Fog rolled in like a form of sorrow. To live exiled from a place you have known intimately is to experience sensory deprivation. A wide-awake coma. ... The sea was a memory bank into which everything fell and was lost. I dove in but came out empty-handed.

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.

Leaves are verbs that conjugate the seasons.

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

There is nothing in nature that can't be taken as a sign of both mortality and invigoration.

To know something, then, we must be scrubbed raw, the fasting heart exposed.