The desert shows no mercy.
The desert isn’t just hot. The desert isn’t just cold. The desert isn’t just windy. The desert isn’t just dry. She’s hot enough to singe the skin off of your back. Cold enough to break off your frozen fingers. Windy enough to push you around, a big bully. She sucks the moisture from your body until your skin turns to paper.
The desert is mercurial. Moody. Unpredictable.
One day, 116 degrees. The next, 34 degrees.
We, humans, are chocolate bars, melting in her extreme heat. Our bodies burn with pain in her cold spells.
I do not care about being hot. I do not care about being cold.
It is the extreme that beats me down.
The desert withholds water from me. Twenty, thirty miles at a time with no water. I am saved only by the kindness of other people who supplement those water gaps.
The desert floor is full of ants, mice, spiders, flies, mosquitoes, rattle snakes.
Mice nibble gear, flies bite, rattle snakes defend.
None of them care about me, either.
The venomous rattle snakes: one bite and you could die.
They only bite if they have reason. They, too, are out living their lives. They look for mice to eat, shelter to rest. We have the same goal. They do not set out to attack without reason.
The land is full of scrubby brush, pale green and tough enough to stab you with their branches. Joshua trees, the wild-armed bristly creations, scatter the grounds. Broken rocks everywhere.
Dramatic blue sunrises that turn pink. Serene orange sunsets that turn red.
It’s quiet out here. The only noise is the whipping wind and my own crunching footsteps.
The desert is wild. The desert is extreme. The desert is fragile.
She drinks only a little water. It sustains the critters that scurry through the bushes. It brings life to the scrubby, scratchy mess we walk through.
Without this tiny source of nourishment, the desert would be miles and miles of sand dunes. She would be a land of desolation. She would be nothing and for no one.
The desert is scarred by fires. Lightening strikes, and the desert receives a brutal beating that spreads throughout her body, ravaging the trees until they’re carcasses of what they once were.
Out of the fire, something special is born.
A wildflower.
Only when the seed of some flowers is exposed to extreme heat will they blossom.
Much like a dragon.
To survive the desert, to withstand her indifference, to walk through her dusty and eroded paths changes you.
You become as free as a wildflower. You become as fierce as a dragon.
The Wonderland Journal 
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