Pursuing the Great Perhaps

The Desert
I call it The Sunset Land, where the rocky faces are alive with color if only you look. Not the lush green that bespeaks bounty and life, but the brilliant colors of blood, sun, and metal. It is a harsh land that only the strong and cunning survive. Nothing ever moves here; there are no trees rustling in the wind, no babbling brook or rushing river, no wildlife that doesn't creep and crawl, no chorus of noise that calls out, life to life. The wind doesn't move; it speaks. It howls through the canyons, tearing at the immovable rock walls and gravel floor, it calls and echoes across empty spaces, and whispers in the night for so often and long one begins to believe that the stars themselves are speaking.
And the stars! No place has a better view of the galaxy surrounding us than the desert. The flat lands always make the sky seem larger, whether they are plains or desert or tundra. But the desert is filled only with stone and shrub. There is no grassland that will not whisper and rustle at each touch from the wind, and no snow and ice-covered ground that does not groan and crack and mutter. The stones and shrubs keep their silence in the dead of night, and the stars are the brightest, brought out by the darkness between them and the silence around them. Looking up from the desert, one may truly feel and see and know that our planet is in fact a planet; a speck of rock much like the one at your feet, caught in the gravity of a star currently unseen, surrounded by the light of dead stars and live ones, infinity written in the sky as our hearts beat out the rhythms of mortality.