From "The Lightning Field"

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5. Your mind unkinks itself like carded wool as one foot steps in front of the other, circling the five-foot figure-eight infinity loop, painted on tarmac at the beach's edge in Bolinas. Soon, like a Himalayan ascetic, you've walked yourself into a waking trance, not breaking pace for any passerby who cuts into your path, only asking a man to move his motorcycle when he begins to park it where one end of the eight loops back. You've heard that if you soften a silkworm's cocoon with water, a continuous thread of silk will unravel for a thousand yards, and think the spool a spider draws from must be endlessly self-renewing, her many spinnerets producing thread as her design requires. You keep walking. With each successive loop, you are being unwound and reconfigured, a skein of stub silk crisscrossed between thumb and little finger of an outstretched palm. Weavers call this bundling a butterfly. On your way home, a brood of Monarchs hovers over a field of purple milkweed, roosting. But one moment you could put your finger on? There were no omens, only unread signs. 8. I had thought the rectangle of steel shafts would feel imposed upon the pristine landscape, an arbitrary post-modern conceit spoiling the view. But once inside the matrix, surrounded by the austere expanse, the sleek sparsely planted forest of tempered poles fanning out and lofting above me, I found that the field's exactingly strict geometry yielded not just jackrabbits, lizards, blue-winged moths, gilia, and grasshoppers flinging themselves against my face, but also a sense of seemingly endless possibility. Pacing the distance between adjacent poles, from one vertex to the next we stopped to plot a makeshift constellation's coordinates, our footsteps connecting points like dashes to dots in a child's draw-by-number book of stars. That no pole stands at the rectangle's center makes mathematical sense (it's not a square) but came as a surprise. I kept count under my breath, though the farther in we got the more they blurred together at the far verge. Midway between the two most central poles was only a scuffed clod of desert scrub-- an omphalos among the obelisks. 14. Walking back, as if an axis had gone slack, we didn't feel that geometric pull on where we stood and which way we proceeded; let loose, we were free to cut across the field, to circumvent the poles, to stop counting. …