For you watercolor lovers…

Great Egret Blue
Limited Edition Printby Roderick MacIver

…as a writer I have to work with my imagination and my mind, and therefore I must lead a life that does not take my imagination away from my work — which means that I must go away from people at times. I find that the most important part of working is not the period when I am actually writing, but the periods when I stop writing between one day and the next morning. That period is terribly important, and though I cannot write in it, it is one in which my imagination should not be caught up in other things since it is an instrument of my writing. That is the sort of incubation period, a time of vulnerable growth. Something goes on, and I like then to go on long walks in the country just by myself. I would love to write twenty-four hours a day, but words are so exacting, such hard work, that I cannot do more than three or, if I am lucky, four hours at a time, however much I long to push on. So, in between, I am anxious to get on to the next morning; I can hardly wait to get back to it.

—Laurens van der Post, from Walk With A White Bushman.

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