I Used To Distinguish Between

Soon The Child’s Clear Eye Is Clouded Over By Ideas And Opinions, Preconceptions, And Abstractions. Simple Free Being Becomes Encrusted With The Burdensome Armor Of The Ego. Not Until Years Later Does An Instinct Come That A Vital Sense Of Mystery Has Been Withdrawn. The Sun Glints Through The Pines And The Heart Is Pierced In A Moment Of Beauty And Strange Pain, Like A Memory Of Paradise. After That Day, We Become Seekers.

When We Are Mired In The Relative World, Never Lifting Our Gaze To The Mystery, Our Life Is Stunted, Incomplete; We Are Filled With Yearning For That Paradise That Is Lost When, As Young Children, We Replace It With Words And Ideas And Abstractions - Such As Merit, Such As Past, Present, And Future - Our Direct, Spontaneous Experience Of The Thing Itself, In The Beauty And Precision Of This Present Moment.

It's A Simplification To Say That The Men [during Stone Age] Went To War To Maintain Their Dominance Over The Women. The Men Would Help Dig Agricultural Ditches Because They Were Superb Farmers. That Was Very Heavy Lifting Work. But Then They Just Preened Themselves, And Put Bird-of-paradise Plumes [in Their Hair], And Smoked Dope.

There's An Elegiac Quality In Watching [american Wilderness] Go, Because It's Our Own Myth, The American Frontier, That's Deteriorating Before Our Eyes. I Feel A Deep Sorrow That My Kids Will Never Get To See What I've Seen, And Their Kids Will See Nothing; There's A Deep Sadness Whenever I Look At Nature Now.

I Like To Hear And Smell The Countryside, The Land That My Characters Inhabit. I Don’t Want These Characters To Step Off The Page, I Want Them To Step Out Of The Landscape.