The world is far larger
than a holiday.

“In a Lalibela church a deacon turned his beeswax candle so the wax would not gutter, and the wall lit gold.”

Quibdó taught me rain — the Atrato swelling brown, drumming on zinc roofs for days. So the dry Ethiopian highlands stunned me: stone churches carved downward into red earth, and air so clear the stars felt close enough to lift down. Reaching Cape Town, two oceans arguing at the cape, I felt a boy from the Chocó had finally touched the seam of the planet.

“In an Antarctic bay a slab of ice rolled over and showed its underside, grooved like a riverbed I would map.”

I gauged the flow of the Paraná for forty years, reading a brown river the way others read a face. Nothing prepared me for the silence near the Antarctic Peninsula, broken only by meltwater threading down a blue wall. From the flat river light of Rosario to the caverns of that ice, I understood, at seventy-one, that the country I love is only the doorstep of something far larger.

“On a Raja Ampat ridge a bird of paradise shook out its plumes at first light, and I forgot to raise my binoculars.”

I band seabirds on the cliffs of Gran Canaria, where the Atlantic is deep and cool and a little severe and the shearwaters return each year on the same wind. Tracking forest birds across the islands of Indonesia, hearing calls I had only known from recordings, undid something. Standing later beneath the Atacama’s star-fields, I felt my island as one small lit harbour, and the planet finally turn fully around me.