[...] Just by looking at nature, I feel as if I'm being swallowed up into it, and in that moment I get the sensation that my body's now a speck, a speck from long before I was born, a speck that is melting into nature herself. This sensation is so amazing that I forget that I'm a human being, and one with special needs to boot.
Nature calms me down when I'm furious, and laughs with me when I'm happy. You may think that it's not possible that nature could be a friend, not really. But human beings are part of the animal kingdom too, and perhaps us people with autism still have some left over awareness of this, buried somewhere deep down. I'll always cherish the part of me that thinks of nature as a friend.
Naoki Higashida, The Reason I Jump: one boy's voice from the silence of autism, Q47 p123, (Sceptre 2014), translated by David Mitchell & Keiko Yoshida
