"Clearly, I had to learn how to abandon certain precepts and categories. In order to enter into the realm of myth, I had to allow myself to accept its paradoxical nature. To look for, or even expect, a neat ending, even a moral, was to demand much more than it was designed to present. If one of my 'teachers' chose to tell me about himself by relating a myth, then he did so with a much more mysterious agenda in mind. Perhaps he was not trying to tell me anything about himself at all. Perhaps, instead, he was attempting to reveal something about his 'spiritual conception.' Perhaps he wanted me to accompany him on a journey to a place ruled by the imagination, not the senses. It seemed that knowledge of the earth — for him, at least — partook of imaginative encounters with its invisible possibilities as much as those designed to make living easier.
"The men that I met were simple people. They lived in thatched huts on the beach or in the forest, or as semi-exiles on the edge of towns. They did not own much other than a few necessities — a boat, some farm tools, or a stretch of mythic territory in the bush. Nor did they have any 'future' in the way that we might understand it. But what they did possess in abundance was the gift of memory and the humility that inspired them to share it with me. They knew consummately their own history and the history of their mythic heroes. These, I soon discovered, were often intertwined as closely as the carved whorls on a mask found outside a longhouse doorway. More often than not they found it difficult to separate their own history from the heroic endeavors of bird, fish, crocodile, and turtle. Each man of knowledge that I met in my travels confronted me with the same age-old question: How can any of us continue to maintain an exploitative relationship with nature without running the risk of doing permanent damage to its integrity?"