Last night, Maria was reading from Mary Oliver’s book Upstream to me just before bed.

When she read the following passage, I was struck by how closely it related to her and her life here. The woods are her sacred place, refuge, meditation, and truth.

“I could not be a poet without the natural world. Someone else could. But not me. For me, the door to the woods is the door to the temple.” – Mary Olver, Upstream.

I interrupted her, I was struck by the passage.

It’s as if she wrote that about you, I said. You could not be an artist without the natural world. You could be an artist without me, I said,  but not without nature.