The Desert

.
The high desert of Arizona is different than any place I know.
It does not look like the deserts I imagined when I grew up: endless sandy landscapes with no discernable life anywhere. The high desert has lots of shrubs, trees even ~ and seems to be deemed a desert by lack of rainfall rather than lack of life.
Something else that is quite different from my childhood ideas of what a desert is, is that it is not always warm in the desert. In the Summer, any desert seems ‘too hot to handle’. In the Winter, however, even the desert can be freezing cold.

This being said, there are also things I have found to be exactly how I imagined it as a kid: one doesn’t have to get far into the desert to experience a complete silence ~ the only sounds that may be there being the sounds of nature like the breeze, the sound of a ravens wings when it flies overhead... And at night one can see millions of stars, just by looking up at the sky!

In all fairness there are a lot of animals, birds and plants living here in the desert ~ a place they now share with free range cattle.

So what makes this desert so special?

For me it is stillness.
Without the distractions of cars and other noises us humans tend to make, the stillness of nature makes it easy to be still within myself, and pretty soon this combination turns into a quiescence that is hard to find anywhere else.

Stay in this state of quiescence long enough, and there is no separation between Self and nature, or even Self and the universe anymore... Not because of putting in effort to learn how to become one with nature, or the universe; but because we are part of nature and the universe, and the quiescence allows for the oneness to become apparent.

Not until I experienced this quiescence did I realize how used we are to sounds being around us. How we consider street lights and car lights ‘normal’. And how much we really move without having a purpose behind it.

Nature, and the universe for that matter, seem to have far greater purpose than us humans. Every sound, every movement, is meaningful. It conveys a message ~ sometimes to another member of the species, sometimes information pertinent to all species in the area...
In this manner, the notice of a change in the weather can be carried on the breeze. The howling of a pack of coyotes may announce the birth of their cubs. And the chatter of the ravens moves from meeting each other, to courting each other, to mating and having their chicks together.

There is a lot going on in the desert.
And its quiescence allows us to be part of it.
.
.