We are animal in our blood and in our skin. We were not born for pavements and escalators but for thunder and mud.

In many traditions, the world was sung into being: Aboriginal Australians believe their ancestors did so. In Hindu and Buddhist thought, Om was the seed syllable that created the world.

The losses of the natural world are our loss, their silence silences something within the human mind.

We are animal in our blood and in our skin. We were not born for pavements and escalators but for thunder and mud.

The woods are a place where children can go to think. Children gravitate towards these spaces. When I was a child it was nothing more than a scrubby little overhang under a rhododendron bush, but it was incredibly important to me.

Human language is lit with animal life: we play cats-cradle or have hare-brained ideas; we speak of badgering, or outfoxing someone; to squirrel something away and to ferret it out.

Children say they are unhappy in every language they have. They say it in silence, and they say it in riots.