The desert: prologue

A number of earthy elements lay claim on my heart: lush mountains and rolling hills; cool, freshwater lakes; softly falling snow; meadows of wildflowers; rich, loamy soil, forests of Aspen, rolling rivers.

But.

But, oh... the desert, the desert.

The desert is my refuge, my place of restoration.

...................

Five years ago, I moved to a city. A large and crowded and humid city, where the houses are so close that two neighbors can give each other high fives out their windows; where trains are so crowded that We the People come home wearing each other's perfume, each other's sweat, each other's heartaches; where even the air is teeming with too much water, too much yelling and shrieking, too many pollutants and cell-phone confessionals.

In the desert, there is space. Space to run and breathe. Space to be alone, to think, to watch, to hear the blood swirling around in your arteries.

In the city, you have to play games to get ahead - games whose rules are ever changing and ever elusive, in which sophistry and shape shifting are necessary survival skills. Games whose rules I have not managed to understand, let alone master.

But in the desert there are no games. In the desert, there is life and death and nothing in between. The unyielding Navajo sandstone doesn't give a damn about what school you went to, and neither the frigid night wind nor the scorching afternoon sun can be flattered into giving you an unfair advantage. There is no pretending, no networking, no benefit to having a large chest-to-waist ratio.

In a system comprised of rock, sand, sun, wind, and sparsely oxygenated air, only the fittest - really - will survive. Juniper and Ponderosa pines jut out of tiny crevices in the stone, bending with the winds and floods as they reach toward the sun. Claret cup and Prickly Pear succulents perch proudly atop immutable cliffs. Bighorn sheep scale seemingly sheer walls.

All compete for mere trickles of water that leisurely meander over the stone.

And when infrequent but deadly flash floods sweep the valley floor, only the strongest remain, and those that do flourish with simple and astonishing beauty.

The desert doesn't care. The desert is not kind, is not lenient. The desert kills - regularly.

And I love it here.

I love the scalding sun, the freezing wind. The hard, unforgiving stone. I love the vertigo-inducing heights, the smell of dust and sage, the silence, the stillness, the madness, the danger, the wildness of it all.

Exhale.