There is a certain mystique to the desert that’s hard to define, but it’s also one that’s impossible to miss when you feel it.  Phoenix is an interesting place, because there are many moments, or even days, that can go by where all you’re aware of is the city, the working classes by day and the clubs at night.  There are other moments when the desert becomes prominent again, offering its strange and exotic beauty to the atmosphere.  Sometimes it comes in the middle of winter, when the temperatures are diving below 50 degrees at times, and the smell of the desert comes through the city.  Sometimes it happens in spring, when the orange blossoms from the citrus orchards waft through and incense everything with a fantastic aroma.  Sometimes it happens when you’re out on the verandah of one of the Phoenix luxury hotels and see the shadow of the mountains beyond the city lights.

Whatever the circumstances, it’s always a heady experience to remember that even though it’s one of the countries largest cities, it’s still the desert, with a magnificent and impossible beauty that none visiting here can forget.  The famous anthropologist and archaeologist of inner space, Carlos Castaneda, is allegedly known to have admitted that he could not set foot in Arizona once he learned some spiritual secrets, because the beauty was just too much to take in.  There is a ferocious loveliness to the place that’s hard to find and hard to avoid at the same time.  It may have something to do with the heat, that comes like a strange visitor a few times in the spring before it settles in to stay at the end of May, and by then it’s moved in like an old uncle that no one remembers until he’s back.

The sun really does own the place during the day, and it’s absolutely gorgeous most of the year.  At night, when the moon is shining on the desert floor, there is a certain sense that nothing in the world has ever been more mysterious, and more right.  It offers the sense that everything will be all right, because life can continue even in the most adverse conditions.  There are many who live here and claim to have spiritual visions as profound or more so than Castaneda, and chances are they are all correct in some side of the moon.  The desert looks like the moon sometimes, often enough that we sometimes forget that it used to be the bottom of the ocean, and we don’t really know who we are.