Here’s an interesting phenom of my own. Serendipitious blogging. Today is Saturday so I am sitting around merely thinking of blogging. What could I possibly say that would perk up interest in world events. Well, most world events are tragic, comic, or somewhere inbetween. So blogging about political events is difficult. The environment and our delicate sphere floating in a universe largely unknown perks up some interest for a moment. For some reason, I think of the desert. I often think of the desert and I usually climb into the “way back” machine and after a few beers remember some half-hidden event of doing years of archeology. This rememberance usually brings a smile or at least a grab at the heartstrings. I have such fond memories of those days that I cannot quite figure out how I did what I did. I translated a life spent building stone tools, traveling in the companionship of some very fine fellows, looking at the rather scattered and incomplete history of small groups of travelers intent on perhaps not leaving a lot behind. Its not like they were supreme ecologists and I think people get that wrong.
But when I travel around and remember the deserts, it dawns on me that the desert is actually a perfect world. Its a world of opposites where sunshine translates the noon to over 100 degrees and the night can be damned cold. Plants and animals have built their systems to survive and even thrive in the desert climes. They know how to deal with heat and cold. Water and no water. Landscapes in transition because the rules of geology act upon the desert like you would not imagine. Think of it as deposition and erosion and happening sometimes in quick succession.
Do I have you panting and wanting more? Laboriously breathing and launching google earth for a view? Hopefully so. Because the deserts of the world capture life in a different set of terms. Ideas transform all around me. I can see the wonder in the small valleys when Dave and I walked the Edwards AFB landscapes. His botanist eyes always glimmering with joy and mirth and our biologist just happy to find the elusive Tortoise or Mojave Green Rattlesnake. Then both would haul out and say, “Perry… We found stones and bones”. I would yelp and run to them. It was my turn to shine.
My turn to thrive, grow, transform.
What do you all do to transform?
