Only through the eyes of other living beings… and the standing presence of the vegetal world… do I begin to know myself. And if I cannot see through their eyes, and feel the wind with their wings, and crawl through the living moistness of the soil in their slender, legless forms… if I do not burst triumphantly from the deeps to taste, for beauty’s sacred sake the world of light and air above… if I do not brave the waterfall, returning to the place of my birth, or howl in the wilderness at the starbound moon of my ever dreaming fever… I am dead to myself. I am stranger. I will die unknown, and be buried never having met my soul. For in the mighty silence of the ancient forests and in the injured hearts of the oceans of earth… my soul is born and learns itself. Without them… it is nought, and all my treasures are destroyed, and all my pleasures… lies.