The Desert

From Paul Shepard's Man in the Landscape:

Silence and emptiness convey divine immanence by their lack of prosaic forms. The desert is the environment of revelation, genetically and physiologically alien, sensorily austere, esthetically abstract, historically inimical. It is always described as boundless and empty, but the human experience there is never merely existential. Its solitude is a not-empty void, a not-quiet silence. Its forms are bold and suggestive. The mind is beset by light and space, the kinesthetic novelty of aridity, high temperature, and wind. The desert sky is encircling, majestic, terrible. In other habitats, the rim of sky above the horizontal is broken or obscured; here, together with the overhead portion, it is infinitely vaster than that of rolling countryside and forest lands.

The Western Edge of Albuquerque, NM

Some Drawings and Thoughts

Here's a few drawings I've done this year (below).

A few things seem to be converging with my work, my thinking and my upcoming Australia trip. I've frequently thought that my work is as much about my internal world as the external, natural world. I'm interested in this relationship, not just between the external and internal, but the specifically external natural world and how my relationship to it affects my psychology. Until recently, I never gave much thought to whom else might have investigated this issue. But I finally did wonder about this and happened upon Paul Shepard, who is considered one of the founders of a field called ecopsychology, which is still very mysterious to me. His most influential book is Nature and Madness. The fundamental theme behind his writing is our alienation from nature and its psychological impact. I'm sure I'll be revisiting this in greater detail in the future.