To The Desert

I’m headed to the desert by Moab soon to make my inner hippie happy and get some perspective. Here’s Paul Bowles‘ feelings about it (even though his desert was the Sahara):

Here, in this wholly mineral landscape lighted by stars like flares, even memory disappears; nothing is left but your own breathing and the sound of your heart beating…Once [someone] has been under the spell of the vast, luminous, silent country, no other place is quite strong enough for him, no other surroundings can provide the supremely satisfying sensation of existing in the midst of something that is absolute. He will go back, whatever the cost in comfort or money, for the absolute has no price.