The subject of walking is, in some sense, about how we invest universal acts with particular meanings. Like eating or breathing, it can be invested with wildly different cultural meanings, from the erotic to the spiritual, from the revolutionary to the artistic.

People rescue each other. They build shelters and community kitchens and ways to deal with lost children and eventually rebuild one way or another.

I was fifteen, and when I picture myself then, I see flames shooting up, see myself falling off the edge of the world, and am amazed I survived not the outside world but the inside one.

Getting lost was not a matter of geography so much as identity, a passionate desire, even an urgent need, to become no one and anyone, to shake off the shackles that remind you who you are, who others think you are.

I often think that the reason capitalism hasn't completely destroyed everything is that a huge amount of anti-capitalist endeavor goes on, from labors of love, nurture, friendship, and barter to gift economies and different kinds of exchanges, not just one alternate model but a whole host of other ways in which we engage with each other and with the world that aren't financial and debt-based.

I still think the revolution is to make the world safe for poetry, meandering, for the frail and vulnerable, the rare and obscure, the impractical and local and small.

Activism is not a journey to the corner store. It is a plunge into the unknown. The future is always dark.