Barely two days in the desert - Anza-Borrego Desert State Park and the southern part of Joshua Tree National Monument by way of Box Canyon Road - and I'm regrounded. If astronomical events remind us of the remote human past, the desert somehow takes me far deeper. Here you find the layered beds of ancient rivers and oceans jangled by the jostling of tectonic plates, all rolled and carved and cracked and embroidered by flows of absent water and wind. And in the midst of it all this inorganic wonder, life finds a way.
