Wisdom of the Desert

I recently spent a few days in Joshua Tree National Park in California with two of my best friends. It's a peculiar, enchanting landscape: a cross between a distant Star Wars planet and a Dr. Seuss cartoonish fantasy. I've always been taken by the desert. It is a setting that somehow wears its history in full display. The record of its sun-scorched days and cold nights is public knowledge: drawn into its dirt, wrapped around its hardy shrubs, collected in its crevasses. The desert doesn’t hide its past, but it does conceal its complexity. Where we think there is drought, there is life. Where we think there is unrelenting harshness, there is fragile adaptation. Where we think there is nothing, there just might be everything. When we slow down to notice the details, we find the truth.