The desert feels close today. The gray sky makes me think of cozy but infrequent days when the clouds shrouded the Franklin Mountains like a light jacket, unsure about the change in season but ready for spring. The experience of driving in El Paso feels near, of enjoying that first new place. I grew immensely as a person there – I believe it was the basis of my whole adulthood, perhaps forever steeped in strange newness, acquiring the scent of the surrounding air, learning the language of my heart – a language I may not have been born with but one I’ve had space for.

And my time in El Paso makes me think of change. To the naked and unexperienced eye, the desert looks two-dimensional and constant. But at a closer glance, it is always changing. When I lived there, I learned the language of change, of responding to the knock of an opening door with curiosity and bright eyes shining with wonder.

The world is resistant to change, or rather, the humans have shackled the earth with an axis that no longer turns of its own accord. But change is the ethos of the planet; without it we would cease to exist. All the earth can be our home if we would just embrace it and stop seeing it through ravenous eyes, only wanting what it can give us rather than letting it show us how we are wrong.

And wrong we are about so many tings. We think we can know the mind of God. How arrogant. He still speaks to us and guides us, but I don’t believe we could ever fully predict what is in store for us any more than we can predict the sun will rise sometime in the immediate future.