Have you ever been in the desert, where all is quiet? Some say the desert is dead, that it is depressing. My friend, they know not life nor death. The desert is sand and sand and sand, but it pulsates with a life so intense that it infuses its essence into your whole being, makes your blood run faster and fills you with new hope and with an added, nobler interest in life.
For things are not always what they seem to be, and there are other forms of life than those we see in the animal and in the vegetable kingdoms. Most of them are unseen, and yet exist as truly as the most material forms. We feel their presence as soon as we but open up and not shut ourselves against them. We feel it most in the silence, and nowhere is the silence so perfect as in the great desert. The silence there is not the physical silence alone, but the compelling grandeur of the sunlit waste or of its starry night enforces an inner silence which is far more rare. It hushes all the voices of the body and of mind so that both become enraptured listeners, filled with enthusiastic admiration for the grand nature-song, which now springs from the silence. It is a song of strong pulsating life that sends a thrill through you, causing all the chords of your being to respond. The inner silence changes now to softest and melodious harmony, in unison with that you hear.
It is in moments such as these that we can realize the "fullness of the seeming void," the majesty of nature and, far from feeling small and crushed down we, too, feel raised above the plane of every-day routine, we lift our heads and feel that we are a part of all that is, and that the melody which our hearts give out must be attuned to the universal chorus.
Great is the desert, the sunny, sandy, wide and silent, living desert.