There has been a change in how I travel. Traveling used to be a matter of leaving home, cutting loose, thrusting out into wild world and waiting to see how it would change me. The world – if you let it – always changes you, but I used to have a clear sense of home…

We are born in the sacred flames, charred and purified, condemned and resurrected. In the moment of our birth, we are given the gift of our death, something to fear, something to cherish. All love-making in between is burdened and exalted by this knowledge. Our daily lives evolve with due diligence, connected to the careful…

The subtle interplay of things is on my mind. I watch how separate things are not; how things that are divided are not divided at all. I watch amazed as a thought first thought 37 years ago comes home to roost almost four decades following its first iteration. I watch as things undone many years…

Out of the waters rises the gift. The morning comes full of gifts. There is the gazelle that prances in my hallway waiting to be chased. (And, of course, I chase her.) Then there is the vision of a life beyond and parallel to this one – composed only of beauty and pleasure and wisdom…

Once, a harmonica saved my life. I was 20 years old and setting off on a voyage that would take me hitchhiking from one coast of the US to the other. Before leaving, I bought my first harmonica. It was an intuition. I just knew that for this voyage, I would need a harmonica. One…

In the plaintive shadows of the canyon where the sun does not reach, I stand alone while the winds descend from the ridge tops and throw themselves at me like mad dogs. My poncho whips up. I am alone but there are generations of men who have gone ahead of me. They have been undone…

The blank white walls of the room are covered in illegible words. Totally. There is no spot that has not been written on. I do not know who wrote them or why, but they are the words that surround me, clamoring to break into my mind, imploring me. Covered in words like tattoos, the walls…

She drifts in and out of my vision and my life. I see her murkily, as if she were beneath the brown Rio de la Plata water. She swims languidly and shows no need of surfacing for air. When she opens her mouth to speak, it is muffled and I only see it opening and…