Benediction: Edward Abbey - Tom Russell

«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 the next turning of the canyon walls.»