Benedicto

I read Abbey at the time when I chose to go into the environmental field. I find the contrast between Abbey's experience of deep imagination, wildness, and creativity in the world hard to bare within the bureaucratic settings we deal with. But the soul needs to live regardless and for it to live we may have to learn to hold both. I think this is my primary work right now. To hold the dream within the same container as waking consciousness.

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

p.s. I rediscovered this poem through a website for the Power of Poetry festival in Logan, Ohio in an essay by Alan Cohen.