Now let me tell you something.
I have seen a thousand sunsets and sunrises,
on land where it floods forest and mountains with honey colored light,
at sea where it rises and sets like a blood orange in a multicolored nest of cloud,
slipping in and out of the vast ocean.
I have seen a thousand moons:
harvest moons like gold coins,
winter moons as white as ice chips, new moons like baby swans' feathers.
I have seen seas as smooth as if painted,
colored like shot silk or blue as a kingfisher or transparent as glass or black
and crumpled with foam,
moving ponderously and murderously.
I have felt winds straight from the South Pole,
bleak and wailing like a lost child;
winds as tender and warm as a lover's breath;
winds that carried the astringents mell of salt and the death of seaweeds;
winds that carried the moist rich smell of a forest floor, the smell of a million flowers.
Fierce winds that churned and moved the sea like yeast,
or winds that made the waters lap at the shore like a kitten.
I have known silence:
the cold, earthy silence at the bottom of a newly dug well;
the implacable stony silence of a deep cave;
the hot, drugged midday silence when everything is hypnotised and stilled into silence
by the eye of the sun;
the silence when great music ends.
I have heard summer cicadas cry so that the sound seems stitched into your bones.
I have heard tree frogs in an orchestration as complicated as bach singing
in a forest lit by a million emerald fireflies.
I have heard the keas calling over grey glaciers that groaned to themselves
like old people as they inched their way to the sea.
I have heard the hoarse street vendor cries of the mating Fur seals as they sang
to their sleek golden wives, the crisp staccato admonishment of the rattle snake,
the cobweb squeak of the bat and the belling roar of the red deer knee-deep
in purple heather.
I have heard wolves baying at a winter's moon,
red howlers making the forest vibrate with their roaring cries.
I have heard the squeak, purr and grunt of a hundred multi-colored reef fishes.
I have seen hummingbirds flashing like opals round a tree of scarlet blooms,
humming like a top.
I have seen flying fish, skittering like quick silver across the blue waves,
drawing silver lines on the surface with their tails.
I have seen spoonbills flying home to roost like a scarlet banner across the sky.
I have seen whales, black as tar, cushioned on a cornflower blue sea,
creating a versaille of fountain with their breath.
I have watched butterflies emerge and sit, trembling,
while the sun irons their wings smooth.
I have watched tigers, like flames, mating in the long grass.
I have been dive-bombed by an angry raven, black and glossy as the Devil's hoof.
I have lain in water warm as milk, soft as silk, while around me played ahost of dolphins.
I have met a thousand animals and seen a thousand wonderful things …
All this I did without you.
This was my loss.
All this I want to do with you.
This will be my gain.
All this I would gladly have forgone for the sake of one minute of your company,
for your laugh, your voice, your eyes, hair, lips, body,
and above all for your sweet, ever surprising mind
which is an enchanting quarry in which it is my privilege to delve.