Anything that lives where it would seem that nothing could live, enduring extremes of heat and cold, sunlight and storm, parching aridity and sudden cloudbursts, among burnt rocks and shifting sands, any such creature, beast, bird, or flower, testifies to the grandeur and heroism inherent in all forms of life.  Including the human.  Even in us.

[Edward Abbey]

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I find the desert beautiful.  It can be dismal, boiling, stinging, biting, terrifying and  blinding.  It can also be lush, gentle, sweet, fragrant and otherworldly.  I would know, I lived in the low desert of Arizona for almost four full years and grew acquainted with the nature of the land there to a great degree.  I love it and I hate it.

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White Sands is spectacular, a literal sea of white on this windy day wherein the sky meets the earth in a tempered blaze.  My eyes hurt to look out at it.  It’s like being in a 105F degree snowstorm.  At the end of the day I will have tiny signs of snow blindness, M, too, will actually lay on her hotel bed with a wet facecloth across her eyes.  Where is this place?  Where have we come?  What is it?  Snow or sand, sun or ice?  The very light of the place confuses the senses.

The sand is deep, mystical, pure white.  By the time I climb in the car for departure, the fineness of the stuff is clinging to every inch of my skin.  It’s in my underwear, my armpits, my eyelids.  I’m pregnant with it, carrying a million minute grains, mother to a miniature desert creeping across my skin in moon shaped dunes.

Oh God!  What is this place?  Creation is too great to fathom at times.  I want to blend in, creep across the shifting particles in jerky steps, like the purple lizard I watched take shade beneath the yucca.  Was it really purple?  I cannot tell the colors here for all the holy light.

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I begin to think about survival.  I begin to think about the hero in myself, not just here in the desert, but in life.  That small portion of my being that is capable of arriving in the nick of time, broad of heart, self-sacrificing in times of need, jovial, caring, important…where is the hero in me and how do I tend to it?

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Do not let the hero in your soul perish in lonely frustration, for the life you deserved but never have been able to reach.  Check your road and the nature of your battle.  The world you desired can be won.  It exists, it is real, it is possible, it is yours.

[Ayn Rand:: Atlas Shrugged]