The desert world accepts my homage with it’s customary silence. The grand indifference. As any man of sense would want it. If a voice from the clouds suddenly addressed me, speaking my name in trombone tones, or some angel in an aura of blue flame came floating toward me along the canyon rim, I think I would be more embarrassed than frightened – embarrassed by the vulgarity of such display. That is what depresses in the mysticism of Carlos Castaneda and his like: their poverty of imagination. Has any honest magician knows, true magic inheres in the ordinary, the commonplace, the everyday, the mystery of the obvious. Only petty minds and trivial souls yearn for supernatural events, in capable of perceiving that everything – everything! Within and around them is pure miracle.
Edward Abbey, Abbey’s Road
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