“Benedicto”

“May
your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the
most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the
clouds. 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, blue mesas, domes and pinnacles and grottos of endless
stone, 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, “Benedicto”