The bitter and lucid joys of solitude. The real desert is this: to face the real limitations of one's own existence and knowledge and not try to manipulate them or disguise them. Then, new possibilities open up in the PRESENT.

"The bitter and lucid joys of solitude. The real DESERT is this: to face the real limitations of one's own existence and knowledge and not try to manipulate them or disguise them . . . We have trained ourselves to think that we live at every moment amid unlimited hopes.  There is nothing we cannot have if we try hard enough, or look in the right place for it.  But in solitude, when accurate limitations are seen and accepted, they then vanish, and new dimensions open up. The PRESENT is in fact, in itself, unlimited.  The only way to grasp it in its unlimitedness is to remove the limitations we place on it by FUTURE expectations and hopes and plans, or surmises, or regrets about the PAST . . ."

Thomas Merton, 1966

"Wisdom is knowing what to do NEXT."

David Starr Jordan,

Founding President, Stanford University

Photo: The purple pads of prickly-pear (ha!) glisten in morning sunlight; Needles District, Canyonlands National Park, UT; November 25, 2012