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The urge to get up and go—to travel, to follow the beckoning horizon, to leave oneself behind and thereby approach inner silences and spaces—that need must be as old as our awareness of mankind. Stopovers will be places of the imagination but also stations of survival: a privileged valley, a well with water shining blackly, grazing for the animals, a marketplace with shouts and murmurs of cloth, a town of wise men and unwise women and little bowls holding red sweets, stuffed pigeon breasts, the season just started, a crossing and jostling of stars, the distance where wind is born.
My eye instinctively deciphers the land as if it were a book telling of riddles and of dangers. Nothing belongs to me and yet I am the proprietor of a slew of stars, of that wind now, of this direction here, of these very shadows snaking along the earth. Each journey will be into the unknown, but even so, routes are traced the way thoughts and dreams become words and the words become tracks and the tracks turn to sand. Sand moving in a haze over your vision will be a veil of footsteps—my own, those of the ancestors, those of my companions. Birds will remember me in the sky, their flight an arrow in the soil. That’s how you read the paragraphs of my life.
The sun is my shelter, the night my fire.
