I used to sleep in the desert once every week, now it is every two weeks, most of the time alone. It’s beautiful. What I enjoy is taking my food and cooking for myself.
When you’re on a highway, viewing the western U.S. with the mountains and the flatness and the desert and all that, it’s very much like my paintings.
The monastery of Christ in the Desert had its resident hermit, Brother Xavier, chosen after years of devotion and service, a monk so trusted and experienced that he qualified by Benedictine standards to be sent to the front lines in the fight against the devil.
From the world wars of Europe to the jungles of the Far East, from the deserts of the Middle East to the African continent, and even here in our own hemisphere, our veterans have made the world a better place and America the great country we are today.
I found out that there was this project called the ‘Great Green Wall’ where they wanted to plant trees across the Sahara desert, and the idea was born that I wanted to create a support structure for that initiative.
I felt alone out there, like I was on a desert island. I felt like Gilligan.
There is such a peace out in the middle of the desert. There’s nothing like it.
Men have looked upon the desert as barren land, the free holding of whoever chose; but in fact each hill and valley in it had a man who was its acknowledged owner and would quickly assert the right of his family or clan to it, against aggression.
In the future, I expect to see bitcoin mining in places where electricity is free or cheap. You could put solar array in the Arizona desert attached to bitcoin miners, and instead of trying to ship that electricity all over world, you could ship Bitcoin all over the world.
To hike out alone in the desert; to sleep on the valley floor on a night with no moon, in the pitch black, just listening to the boom of silence: you can’t imagine what that’s like.
The rules of survival never change, whether you’re in a desert or in an arena.
For Operation Desert Shield and Desert Storm, 267,300 reserve component service men and women were called to service.
Yet the wonder of it all is that, while engaged in a seemingly endless struggle, the Israelis have managed to turn a desert into a garden.
It took five days to drive to Los Angeles by myself. I listened to Abbey Road for six hours at a time and watched the desert open up before me again and again. I saw the sun set and rise at the Grand Canyon, and I sang out over the cliffs, picked up tumble weeds along the way and threw them in the back of my car.
I was born in 1951 in Kalgoorlie, a prosperous mining town 370 miles east of Perth, Western Australia. Kalgoorlie was a gold rush town which sprang up in the desert after the Irishman Paddy Hannan struck gold there in 1892.
People find beauty in the desert. I don’t know where they’re looking because I haven’t found it. It’s ugly. It’s nasty. It’s dirt. It’s desert. It’s sand. It’s rock. It’s cactus. It’s lizards and snakes.
The magnificent army that fought in Desert Storm is a great army, and it still is a magnificent army today. But it was one we designed for the Cold War, and the Cold War has been over for ten years now.
Within two hours of where I live, you have mountains and desert as location. I like the natural elements that abstract into light, texture, shape and shadow.
For me, novel-writing, by its nature, contains months of feeling lost, gloomy, fatally misguided. The challenge has always been in assuring myself that by setting one foot in front of the other, I will eventually make my way out of the desert.
