Introduction
You might recognize these words as the title of a book by Mary Austen, in which she records her experience of living in the Mojave Desert near Lone Pine, California. Her reflections reveal the habit of patient observation that the desert requires, if one is to understand the place or make a home there.
The first time I visited Joshua Tree National Park, in the Mojave Desert, I felt an immediate sense of belonging. This feeling has sustained me through many twists and turns, and has been a constant thread running through my last eighteen years of meanderings—intellectual, professional, and geographic.
I am blessed by the connection. And yet, I do not understand it. Like many of my contemporaries, I am plagued by a constant wanderlust that is exciting and lonely. I have moved around a lot, and am always searching for a home and community that I have not, evidently, had the rooted patience to develop and tend, not in the hearth fire, hometown, neighborhood, barn-raising, potluck dinner kind of way. I lack community, but I do experience communion in the desert, a huge, relatively barren, hard edged place, dry, often hot, always windy.
My experience of, and love for, the desert, feels personal and is in some sense unique. But all myth is collective. 
On this page I dedicate space to a conversation and reflection that I believe supports and weaves through everything else that is exchanged on this site.
Ecopsychology, the exploration of human ideas about, and relations to, the earth and its many other inhabitants, the imagined human place and purpose in the cosmos, is of particular interest and concern to me. Our eco-psychology is fundamental to our survival. The outdoors, the natural world, is also where I find inspiration, healing, and feel most human.
This page provides some context for posts that appear in the main blog and other materials indexed to this topic, “The Land of Little Rain.” As always, I invite you to share your thoughts. I think it’s likely that the search for perspective, for healing stories and myths for the future, will come from the earth itself, from a rediscovery of place.
