I'll put it to you this way: I never, ever think about the things that I get involved with on a macro means-to-an-ends scale.

Filmmaking is always sort of building a mosaic of this arc of what the character is going through.

Animals teach us about the animals in ourselves. We need their spirits.

Animals love. They love their being. They strive to survive, to celebrate, to propagate . So certainly something we learn from animals is love. To survive and to celebrate, propagate and to love life. To be the best we can be - the right to be here and the responsibility to be the best dog or bear or horse that they can be. Humans have the tendency to self pity that other animals don't indulge in.

Do not confuse beauty with beautiful. Beautiful is a human judgment. Beauty is All. The difference is everything.

We all share beauty. It strikes us indiscriminately. There is no end to the beauty for the person who is aware. Even the cracks between the sidewalk contain geometric patterns of amazing beauty. If we take pictures of them and blow up the photographs, we realize we walk on beauty every day, even when things seem ugly around us.

The whole purpose of letting pain be pain is this: to let go of pain. By entering into it, we see that we are strong enough and capable enough to move through it. We find out that it ultimately has a gift for us.