I don’t get the idea of settlement. I don’t get the emotional investment in the idea of ‘home’ with its illusory promise of permanence. I do understand how geography exerts a spiritual hold. There are places to which I always return, if only because they're refuges or hideouts. My migratory patterns are as constant, if not quite as predictable or sacramental, as those of a traditional nomad. I might re-map them occasionally, to add a new waypoint or to eliminate an old one, but I don’t often wander far from them. The slow, unceasing circumnavigation that has occupied my whole life could be plotted with a series of rhumb lines from one familiar place to another.

Which is not to say I'm incurious about the rest of the world. It's just that my experience of it is measured. Each place in my personal atlas has a meaning or purpose even before I find my way to it.