Space

What is it, what’s the appeal, why the desert? Since the days of the original white frontiersmen, popular rhetoric would have you believe people are drawn here in search of a romanticized sense of adventure; to confront and triumph over the unknown; to challenge life at it’s most hostile. On the contrary, you’re more likely to find folks aiming to escape a culture that promotes such ignorant fantasies. Sure there are dangers out here, sometimes even a bit of excitement; with the threat of freezing temperatures over the weekend, folks had to turn-off their water to prevent bursting pipes! If danger and excitement are what you’re after, try volunteering at an inner-city homeless shelter.

Out here, things move pretty slowly. Gone is the din of the city, the hum of the highway, the drone of airplanes overhead. Gone are the crowds, the grid-lock, the billboards. There is no garish parade, just sobering panorama. Looking out over the desert’s horizon the physical world is reduced to its most basic; earth and sky. Their twin power is palpable, forcing you to stop in pious reverence. On a clear day the infinite sky remains beyond our grasp; at night, the blanket of stars feels so close as to wrap it ’round your cold shoulders. The mountains–monuments to the strength of time–nonchalantly gouge the horizon with blades of apathetic impunity.

In a place so vast yet sparsely inhabited, the desert is silent like nowhere else. Silence from the world, silence from our thoughts; space to see, space to think; time to explore and time to ponder. The desert represents an absence of trivial distractions, filled instead with critical reflections. It is within this space, absorbed in silence, that we are reminded that while life is precious, we are utterly insignificant.