Steve Boyes > Quotes

“Elephants are sentient beings that live as long as we do. I have witnessed them celebrate birth and mourn death. They show a meandering, rocking, radiating, empathetic, mindful unity, a grandness beyond human conception. It’s humbling.”
― Steve Boyes, Okavango and the Source of Life: Exploring Africa's Lost Headwaters

“Being lost in this place showed me that when the whole world was wilderness, we were all free. We died young, lived hard, and believed in magic. This is the way of the wild.”
― Steve Boyes, Okavango and the Source of Life: Exploring Africa's Lost Headwaters

“It isn’t just about closer interaction; it’s about acceptance. It’s about equal rights to exist and a shared destiny.”
― Steve Boyes, Okavango and the Source of Life: Exploring Africa's Lost Headwaters

“In Wayeyi culture, nature is more musical than purposeful when you get to know it. GB taught me to pause and listen.”
― Steve Boyes, Okavango and the Source of Life: Exploring Africa's Lost Headwaters

“He doesn’t live in the hope that at some point in time, in the distant future but not now, he will achieve happiness, security, and peace. His freedom is natural, and it’s now. Tradition is our living connection to this freedom.”
― Steve Boyes, Okavango and the Source of Life: Exploring Africa's Lost Headwaters

“These are the people who stayed when everyone else left to colonize the planet. They are the custodians of humanity’s true, untapped superpower: the ability to be in nature and truly understand our role within it.”
― Steve Boyes, Okavango and the Source of Life: Exploring Africa's Lost Headwaters

“In the crystal clear water of a free-flowing river, we are reborn, guided to a better future connected to our ancestral roots, curious again, wanting to know more about the natural world, wanting to protect it for those who will come after us.”
― Steve Boyes, Okavango and the Source of Life: Exploring Africa's Lost Headwaters

“Rivers unite and divide, connect and isolate. They bring new life and can wash it away.”
― Steve Boyes, Okavango and the Source of Life: Exploring Africa's Lost Headwaters

“If we can learn how to coexist with elephants, we have a model for a sustainable future.”
― Steve Boyes, Okavango and the Source of Life: Exploring Africa's Lost Headwaters

“Our world needs places like this, an Eden where we can begin again.”
― Steve Boyes, Okavango and the Source of Life: Exploring Africa's Lost Headwaters

“Only local people know how best to protect places like Lisima. The best thing we can do is learn how to support them.”
― Steve Boyes, Okavango and the Source of Life: Exploring Africa's Lost Headwaters

“I have never met a person living along a river in rural Africa who isn’t welcoming, generous, and friendly. Water has a strange way of calming us, uniting us, and making us whole again.”
― Steve Boyes, Okavango and the Source of Life: Exploring Africa's Lost Headwaters

“Yet I know that the nature of nature is unpredictable. We’re desperately trying to understand and control it because we’re scared. We’ve realized that life will go on without us, and yet we know that we are inherently linked with these ecosystems—we reach out and yearn to be part of them. Nature isn’t a puzzle to be solved: We are.”
― Steve Boyes, Okavango and the Source of Life: Exploring Africa's Lost Headwaters

“My heart beats and my lungs open for Africa.”
― Steve Boyes, Okavango and the Source of Life: Exploring Africa's Lost Headwaters

“The Cuito River taught us many lessons. One that we learned that day is to be humble and stay present at all times. There’s no room for ego or ambition on wild rivers guarded by hippos and crocodiles: just respect and a resolute plodding attitude to progress.”
― Steve Boyes, Okavango and the Source of Life: Exploring Africa's Lost Headwaters

“Early 21st-century exploration is about returning to the source we left long ago. It’s about protecting, not exploiting; documenting, not discovering; and reconnecting with what it means to be human—because, somewhere along the way, we forgot.”
― Steve Boyes, Okavango and the Source of Life: Exploring Africa's Lost Headwaters

“The meeting place of heaven and Earth. A place where trees talk to stars and the sunset challenges the universe.”
― Steve Boyes, Okavango and the Source of Life: Exploring Africa's Lost Headwaters

“The most powerful Luchazi chief had one simple question: “How can you possibly protect a place where you can’t be?”
― Steve Boyes, Okavango and the Source of Life: Exploring Africa's Lost Headwaters

“Their footprints are everywhere, but they remain unseen. Their footfalls, soft as whispers, are echoes of Earth’s ancient heartbeat. The ghost elephants are memories of the world as it once was: pure and untroubled, wild and unbridled.”
― Steve Boyes, Okavango and the Source of Life: Exploring Africa's Lost Headwaters

“His music danced like flickering flames, echoing primordial rhythms, whispering old stories to the stars, the water, and the earth below. When Tom played, time stopped.”
― Steve Boyes, Okavango and the Source of Life: Exploring Africa's Lost Headwaters

“It felt like all life was holding its breath. He landed in front of me and looked into my eyes, beyond my soul. I had never felt so connected to the present moment.”
― Steve Boyes, Okavango and the Source of Life: Exploring Africa's Lost Headwaters

“We didn’t discover anything new that year; we found a place we all used to inhabit, a people like we all used to be. Ten thousand years ago, our entire world was wilderness. Today, wilderness is all that remains of that world now long gone.”
― Steve Boyes, Okavango and the Source of Life: Exploring Africa's Lost Headwaters

“By entering to document them, do we destroy these last wildernesses, or can we remember how to be part of them?”
― Steve Boyes, Okavango and the Source of Life: Exploring Africa's Lost Headwaters

“When I visit Henry at the Smithsonian, I think about extinction: about trying to find hope in time that is always running out.”
― Steve Boyes, Okavango and the Source of Life: Exploring Africa's Lost Headwaters

“When you walk on an island in the delta, you feel life wrap around you. An imperceptible heartbeat, a love and a threat, permeates all experience.”
― Steve Boyes, Okavango and the Source of Life: Exploring Africa's Lost Headwaters

“There are giants in this world, quiet contributors who carry us on their shoulders without fatigue or complaint.”
― Steve Boyes, Okavango and the Source of Life: Exploring Africa's Lost Headwaters

“There are people on Earth who still live without time. They wake up with the sun and the morning chorus. They live with the rain and stars, connected to the ebb and flow of living. They are present and alive.”
― Steve Boyes, Okavango and the Source of Life: Exploring Africa's Lost Headwaters

“I had found the place I had been looking for all my life. The decision was made: I was coming back to live in northern Botswana. This is where I would get completely and entirely lost—and where I would come to find myself.”
― Steve Boyes, Okavango and the Source of Life: Exploring Africa's Lost Headwaters

“On these long expeditions, you might consider whether it is all worth it, being away so long. But you have to believe.”
― Steve Boyes, Okavango and the Source of Life: Exploring Africa's Lost Headwaters

“They walk silently because they are listening with their feet.”
― Steve Boyes, Okavango and the Source of Life: Exploring Africa's Lost Headwaters