The two important things I did learn were that you are as powerful and strong as you allow yourself to be, and that the most difficult part of any endeavor is taking the first step, making the first decision.
That arrogance of youth and that kind of ignorant confidence can get you through a whole lot of things, and then life does its stuff, and you get smashed around and beaten up. You get full of doubts, and you end up making a person out of those bits and pieces.
The agricultural revolution transformed the earth and changed the fate of humanity. It produced an entirely new mode of subsistence, which remains the foundation of the global economy to this day.
There are worse things than being called 'the camel lady,' I suppose.
As we've lost this idea of pilgrimage, we've lost this idea of human beings walking for a very, very long time. It does change you.
I love the desert and its incomparable sense of space.
The desert is natural; when you are out there, you can get in tune with your environment, something you lose when you live in the city.
By taking to the road, we free ourselves of baggage, both physical and psychological. We walk back to our original condition, to our best selves.
The French word for wanderlust or wandering is 'errance.' The etymology is the same as 'error.' So to wander is to make mistakes. In other words, to make mistakes, to make errors is sort of the idea of learning through trial and error, allowing the mistakes to be part of the process.
Some of the best conversations I've had are sitting around a camp fire.
You apply the skills you use to produce your own book to make an anthology. Shaping. Rhythm.
Think for yourself. Act for yourself. Find out what you're capable of.
I don't want to be bored; I don't want to be with someone I don't respect.
At the age of 25, I gave up my study of Japanese language and culture at university in Brisbane and moved to the town of Alice Springs.
During these last ten thousand years, we have made massive, unprecedented changes to the environment, creating problems for ourselves that we may not be able to solve.
In every religion I can think of, there exists some variation on the theme of abandoning the settled life and walking one's way to godliness. The Hindu sadhu, the pilgrims of Compostela walking past their sins, the circumambulators of the Buddhist kora, the haj.
I do not mean to say that we should, or could, return to traditional nomadic economies. I do mean to say that there are systems of knowledge and grand poetical schemata derived from the mobile life that it would be foolish to disregard or underrate. And mad to destroy.
I do believe that the genre reached its peak before the First World War.
That odd idea that one person can go to a foreign part and in this rather odd voice describe it to the folks back home doesn't make much sense in the post-colonial world.
I'm not one of those true writers who can't bear not to be writing. Yet it's one of the most important things in my life.
