“I wander a bit too far and get lost in the desert of Wadi Rum. Forward, backward and sideways, the sand looks the same in all directions, and all seems to lead to the same unknown place. I walk until I come across a young woman and her daughter, hanging laundry outside a tent. She is a wife of the highest Bedouin leader. She invites me in and we wait together. This is the song he plays for me, his unexpected desert guest, and we feast.”

“In the strangely beautiful Venezuelan jungle lies the Orinoco River. A sacred river. Home to the Pemon Indians. And a river that seems to hold space for the entirety of everything that surrounds it. I listen to an offering, sung by the medicine women. Medicine songs invoke natural and/or magical powers. Like the Orinoco.”

“We are camped in a tent on the far edges of nature. It is somewhere between pitch black night and dawn.”

“People who work close to the land are the keepers of its spirit. On a small island in Greece, Maria, an 71-year-old shepherdess, starts each day at sunrise and closes it with the round-up and feeding of the family’s sheep in the evening. This has been her life since she was a girl. She knows each animal in her flock by the sound of its bell.”

“The Mehrangarth Fort stands 410 feet above the city of Jodhpur. I am lured not only by the verticality of the ascent, but by a voice–young, unrestrained, with the energy of water at a roiling boil. It is hard to separate the place from the voice. And I remember this from The Eyes of the Skin: Buildings do not react to our gaze, but they do return our sound back to our ears.”