Shepard for the Day.10

"The quests and tests that mark his passage in adolescent initiation are not intended to reveal to him that his love of the natural world was an illusion or that, having seemed only what it was, it in some ways failed him.  He will not graduate from that world but into its significance.

So, with the end of childhood, he begins a lifelong study, a reciprocity with the natural world in which its depths are as endless as his own creative thought.

He will not study it in order to transform its liveliness into mere objects that represent his ego, but as a poem, numinous and analogical, of human society."

Paul Shepard
Nature and Madness
p.9