I have tried many times to capture my backyard with my camera. But I can’t. I can’t capture the liberating sweep of weedy flatland that extends beyond my iron fence to a brown border of identical houses clustered like children in the shadow of purple-grey mountains. I can’t capture the stillness of the air or its paralyzing, clarifying heat. I can’t capture the peripheral openness of it all, always expanding beyond the corner of my eye.

I can’t capture all this with my camera; but I can’t even capture all this with my senses.

And what’s the use of capturing it anyway? Always we try to possess things. What if things possess us? Like dogs, aquiver with adoring expectation, who sit in kennels all day long for the pleasure of a few moments with their master, we grind our minds closed and our bodies tense against the rough grain of daily labor, always longing for that evening walk, that sunset reward.

This desert, this piece of Arizona where I live subverts my reasons for living the way I do, for gazing at the cultural navel of mankind. I am tempted every time I step outside to the freedom of a memory-less existence, like an animal-native of this majestic wilderness. I am reminded that men are greatest in the presence of what they have been placed to steward. We should live outside, without any clothes to hide our bodies or entertainments to hide our souls. We should talk as frequently to mountains and thunderclouds and ravens as we do to each other. But like lovers who hide our engagement rings in a safe, we put our landscape treasures outside. Outside is a drawer for us to hide things in. We pretend the world mainly extends between the walls of our boxes.

This may be my last summer in Arizona. Knowing this I feel a perpetual draw towards the light and dust outside my boxy little house. Like a man who is dying and longs to urge posterity to see the preciousness of life, I wish my last days here to point to the land, to the scene of our adventures, heartbreak, and hope.