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. I live in the Mojave near Joshua Tree, with my husband and two cats in a small cabin with a glorious view.
The first time I visited Joshua Tree National Park, in 1990, I felt an immediate sense of belonging. This feeling has sustained me through many twists and turns and meanderings—intellectual, professional, and geographic.
I am blessed by the connection but 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, 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. 
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.
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. Welcome. I invite you to share your thoughts.
