“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Once more, as I’ve done often in recent years, I expressed the hope to myself that in another probable reality very similar to this one I opted for the outdoor life in a much stronger way—even to living outside night and day for most of the year. I must be doing so right now! In that probable life I use a tent sometimes, but I cook and sleep outside as much as possible, except in the worst weather. What a different life! I’m still a painter, I often think, but perhaps not a writer. I might be a Milton Avery or a Paul Cézanne type of artist. More and more I’ve come to admire—revere, even—the single-minded, childlike devotion artists like Avery and Cézanne had for their art. Not that I want to copy Cézanne, for instance [I couldn’t even if I wanted to], but in that other reality I too chose to live the natural life in a more naive or clear-eyed manner—to sublimate myself before nature while at the same time trying to become master of whatever means of expression I can achieve.

Even though she values the idea of independence as much as I do, the idea of such a life doesn’t appeal to Jane at all. Not that she didn’t take to camping, for instance, when I introduced her to it after we married in 1954. She grew up in a quite different physical and psychological environment, however, and the outdoor, athletic life was not a part of that ambience. But she more than proved her own intuitive grasp of nature, and of my own desires, by producing for me as a Christmas present [© 1977] her excellent book, The World View of Paul Cézanne: A Psychic Interpretation….