Thriving in the desert...

Before living in the desert, I tended to look at it as nothing but a totally wide open, arid wasteland. It was a place where things dried up. It was a place where very little could grow. It was an environmental limbo of sorts.

Now that I live in the desert and occasionally wander out into it to explore, I've made an interesting discovery.

There is life in the desert.

Lots of it.

And it is a place where some highly adaptable and hardy things are able to thrive.

This made me realize something: I've spent a lot of the last several years of my life in fear. While yes, I've made several long distance moves (even across an ocean to another country where I only knew one person), I've still found fear in lots of little things: a bump in the night, something I heard on the news, even fear of how people perceive me because I've heard somebody say something about someone else and immediately applied it to myself. And you know what?

Life is too short for nonsense like that.

Over the last month, I've been able to travel and explore more. I've spent lots of long days in the desert and while at one point in my life, I thought that it wouldn't a place that inspired much in me, I've found the opposite to be true. My time in the desert has awoken things in me that I didn't realize were sleeping. The desert is doing to me what it's done to the creatures that thrive within it: it's making me stronger. The more time that I spend exploring the desert, the stronger my body and mind get and this strength has helped to banish the silent demons that I've realized have been whispering into my ears for years. Even in places like Death Valley and the Valley of Fire, I've found life and I've found inspiration to cool myself down and chill out.