as a child i had a deep mystic feeling for nature. sometimes in a quiet spot in the dunes on the dutch coast i undressed myself and pressed my body to the earth or fell into a light trance by looking to the sea and the endless arriving waves. once i read a book on hopi indians from the local library and discovered their holy number was six: the four directions, earth and sky. it became so important to me that i ordered almost everything in life after this number. later i studied horticulture and agriculture and worked in same research institutions for many years. it brought me in nature but the relationship in those times was never so intensive connected as in childhood. for my work as artist in the mean time nature gave me always the impressions i needed.

there are artists who use natural materials. they create with natural materials or take them into their work. not me. the difference is that they use natural materials- i only present them, because of the revelatory character of everything in the natural world. or, like krsna said: i am all this!

i learned all this after the intake of psychedelics - it cleansed my senses of concepts and ideas and programs, made me healthy after many years of illness - and allowed me to see.

physics and metaphysics are one.

when i look at a grass, a tree, a stream, it becomes part of my identity - or i become part of them (that is no difference), inner and outer world unite. my food becomes me - i become my food. all and everything that is material shows at the same time its trancendance.

to be all ways to be to be to be ways all to be to be.

source: herman de vries, '[as a child ...]', dated eschenau, autumn 1992; statement for symposium san luis potosi 1992 schamanism. plants and altered states of consciousnes, published in to be : texte - textarbeiten - textbilder (Stuttgart 1995) 159-160.