We've had a long time to get used to the screams. Just as our
civilizations expansion is marked by a widening circle of genocide, so too
forests and all of their inhabitants precede us. Deserts dog our heels.

But at my back I always hear
Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.

We are not fit to lead an army on the march unless we are familiar with the face of the country — its mountains and forests, its pitfalls and precipices, its marshes and swamps.

The roaring seas and many a dark range of mountains lie between us.

We all have forests in our minds. Forests unexplored, unending. Each one of us gets lost in the forest, every night, alone.

There is something waiting for us at the edge of the woods, and it is our fate to meet it.

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.

Before you have your dreams, your dreams have you, and every day pushes a night before it while the wilderness follows.

Because we need brutality and raw adventure, because men and women first learned to love in, under, and all around trees, because we need for every pair of feet and legs about ten leagues of naked nature, crates to leap from, mountains to measure by, deserts to finally die in when the heart fails.

Many of us have lived desert lives: very small on the surface, and enormous under the ground.

You've got to spread out as far as you can, cut down a whole forest, irrigate a whole desert, just to make sure that you won't accidentally stumble upon a place that's still in its natural state.

I did not reach thee,
But my feet slip nearer every day;
Three Rivers and a Hill to cross,
One Desert and a Sea — I shall not count the journey one
When I am telling thee.

Two deserts — but the year is cold
So that will help the sand — One desert crossed, the second one
Will feel as cool as land.
Sahara is too little price
To pay for thy Right hand!

The sea comes last. Step merry, feet!
So short have we to go
To play together we are prone,
But we must labor now,
The last shall be the lightest load
That we have had to draw.

The Sun goes crooked — that is night — Before he makes the bend
We must have passed the middle sea,
Almost we wish the end
Were further off — too great it seems
So near the Whole to stand.

We step like plush, we stand like snow — The waters murmur now,
Three rivers and the hill are passed,
Two deserts and the sea!
Now Death usurps my premium
And gets the look at Thee.

Mountains complement desert as desert compliments city, as wilderness compliments and completes civilization.

Earth and water, soil and stone, oaks and elms and willows, they were here before us all and will still remain when we are gone.