QUOTE : How can I be alone when these brain cells chat to me their million messages a minute. But sitting there in the ordinary trance that is any mammal’s birthright, say on a desert boulder or northern stump, a riverbank, we can imitate a barrel cactus, a hemlock tree, the water that flows through time as surely as ourselves. The mind loses its distant machine-gun patter, becomes a frog’s occasional croak. A trout’s last jump in the dark, a horned owl’s occasional hoot, or in the desert alone at night the voiceless stars light my primate fingers that I lift up to curl around their bright cosmic bodies.