"The desert is the environment of revelation, genetically and physiologically alien, sensorily austere, esthetically abstract, historically inimical...Its forms are bold and suggestive. The mind is beset by light and space, the kinesthetic novelty of aridity, high temperature, and wind. The desert sky is encircling, majestic, terrible. In other habitats, the rim of sky above the horizontal is broken or obscured; here, together with the overhead portion, it is infinitely vaster than that of rolling countryside and forest lands...In an unobstructed sky the clouds seem more massive, sometimes grandly reflecting the desert land forms imparts a monumental architecture to the clouds as well as to the land...
To the desert go prophets and hermits; through deserts go pilgrims and exiles. Here the leaders of the great religions have sought the therapeutic and spiritual values of retreat, not to escape but to find reality."
-Paul Shepard, Man in the Landscape: A Historic View of the Esthetics of Nature
Venture Not Into the Desert
John Galayda, 2005/2006
Venture not into the desert,
unless you can find good company
within yourself.
For the desert sky is the unbounded belly of a great whale,
vast
void
self-examination is inevitable,
self realization quietly commences
Everyman should come and see,
but not evey man should stay and live.
To be a tourist of the desert
or a townsman?
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