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,
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 the next turning of the canyon
walls.
——Edward Abbey
cimarronsong 