“...the meaning of my thoughts started to float away from me, like leaves that fall from a tree into a river, I was the tree, the world was the river.”

“I want to dissolve in this river, O Shirin, I want my body to go in the leaves of these trees., And I want to be sent in the Day of Resurrection like the silk tree that stands there, carrying its fragrant flowers, indifferent to anything”

“I spend as much time as I can sketching from nature, Dartmoor contains such a rich variety of landscape, as many boulders, foaming rivers and twisted trees as my heart could ever desire. . . . When I look into a river, I feel I could spend a whole lifetime just painting that river.”

“When I listen to you, Godwhen I do what you ask me to,I am like a treeplanted by a river,a tree full of fruitwith leaves that are always green. Ps 1(paraphrased)”

“Up there in that room, as I see it, is the reading and the thinking-through, a theory of rivers, of trees moving, of falling light. Here on the river, as I lurch against a freshening of the current, is the practice of rivers. In navigating by the glow of the Milky Way, the practice of light. In steadying with a staff, the practice of wood.”

“Then they grow away from the earth then they grow away from the sunthen they grow away from the plants and the animals.They see no life.When they lookthey see only objects.The world is a dead thing for themthe trees and the rivers are not alive.the mountains and stones are not alive.The deer and bear are objects.They see no life.They fear.They fear the world.They destroy what they fear.They fear themselves.”