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Buried in an armchair on a small terrace near Lake Powell, I smoke my final cigarette before weariness overtakes me. The Big Dipper looms before me in a calm silence and I think how funny it is that I always find it above me, even now, almost ten thousand kilometers away from home. I smile. Distances are sometimes closer than you think. I had set out alone with my backpack, to leave behind the turmoil that I had carried in my life in the last year, to find myself, to discover different points of view. And while I'm lost in this corner of the world, the words come to my mind that I exchanged with Mike, a singer in a Chicago blues band, who, after his performance at the Kingstone Mines a few nights ago, came up to ask me where I came from and what I was doing there. Our conversation ended by talking about where I would be in the coming days and him wishing me good luck and reminding me that “traveling is a bit like reading a book, you learn many things and open the boundaries of your own mind”. Boy, was he right. Each day of travel was a succession of discoveries, emotions, encounters with strangers who live a life different from mine, with whom I was lucky enough to be able to chat, either after a concert or during a taxi ride or in a forgotten shop on Route 66. The sun wakes me up at dawn and a cup of coffee keeps me company while I contemplate the morning that is warming up on the shores of the lake in a somewhat timid and still silence. Not even the birds seem to want to spoil the stillness loaded with expectation about the new day that is about to begin. I fill my backpack, check that my polaroid is loaded and go to catch the bus that will take me further into Navajo land. I observe the landscape that unfolds before my eyes, with music in my ears and eyes wide to record everything in front of me. Imagine an infinite space. Open. You are following your path when at some point, in this same space, fiery, imposing, majestic red towers appear. A cathedral in the desert. A religious silence of ancient voices and tribes. Far away. Sometimes we forget. There they are, motionless, to remind you of how small you are in front of them. And while you get lost in looking at them, they follow one after the other, silently stubborn, and take your breath away. Caressed by the wind that touches them by blowing red sands coming from who knows where. Everything seems silent, despite several crowds of tourists scattering in the square. The towers are still there. We are the ants who scramble before them to take the cover photo, running here and there. Often aimlessly. I have never seen anything more powerful. Nature has never left me so stunned, with tears in my eyes, with emotion swelling in my chest. What ancient echoes resound among those rocks that I hear only in my heart but which I cannot define? While we are all caught between photographs and videos, I move away only to hear a little of that respectful silence that such a place pushes you to maintain. And I see him, among the dust that follows the gusts of wind; wounded by the globalization that makes him wear a branded shirt of a world-wide shoe giant. He stands aside, in silence. I can’t help but stare at him, I cannot help but be curious about him. And he looks at us, Westerners, immigrants who have violated this cathedral in the desert with carnival noise. He watches, with those eyes hidden in a reddish skin like his land, between pride and a veil of melancholy. He doesn't speak, and he doesn't seem to want to. Our eyes meet on opposite sides of the world. I would like to get closer, and listen in silence to those distant stories. But only a second of my uncertainty, and the dust took him away.