Benedicto: May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous,
leading to the most amazing view.
May your rivers flow without end,
meandering through pastoral valleys tinkling with bells,
past temples and castles and poets’ towers
into a dark primeval forest
where tigers belch and monkeys howl,
through miasmal and mysterious swamps
and down into a desert of red rock,
and down again into a deep vast ancient unknown chasm
where bars of sunlight blaze on profiled cliffs,
where deer walk across the white sand beaches,
where storms come and go
as lightning clangs upon the high crags,
where something strange and more beautiful
and more full of wonder than
your deepest dreams waits for you –
beyond that next turning of the canyon walls.

Edward Abbey

Uit: Desert Solitaire, A Season in the Wilderness, Edward Abbey, Touchstone Books, 1990.
Afbeelding: Autumn in France, Emily Carr,1911.