"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
While I am gone, I just wanted to pass this blessing on to each of you. I will try and do a mobile post, but I understand my host has no internet connection at his home...I may have to stumble the long mile to reach a "Starbucks" (really, am I considering that?) that has Wi/Fi just to put out a post while I am away.
Thanks for Bringing back Edward Abbeys memory-I first read " The Monkey Wrench Gang " while working as a reporter in Southern Utah. I have simply loved everything he writes about-I even loved his description of Bishop Love-mad me howl with laughter. I find myself slowly being pulled toward a simpler existence and I owe some of that pull to Mr. Abbey-thanks Jeff! I appreciate being reminded of how he could make you think!
ReplyDeleteJeff Nielson
Jeff,
ReplyDeleteFor me, Ed continues to live...I was leaving for Germany when he passed away in 1989 and did not get to add my farewells. I have spent many, many hours wandering in "Ed's Desert"...he had a unique voice in his writing and an ability to bring out raw emotion about saving wilderness.