Thirty years ago, my sister, Gale (so named because a gale hit Boston Harbor the night she was born), some friends and I stole a boat in the middle of the night and sailed it out of the Santa Barbara harbor. Suddenly we were becalmed and the current began pushing us toward the breakwall. With no running lights and no power, we were dead in the water. Out of that darkness a steel hull appeared: it was the local Coast Guard cutter. My father, stern-faced and displeased, stood in the bow.

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?

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

Everything in nature invites us constantly to be what we are.

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

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

Perhaps despair is the only human sin.