Today is one of those still desert winter-into-spring days where the warm air caresses your arms and the blue sky keeps drawing your eyes upwards and the gray steady presence of the mountains quiets something inside, making the simple act of walking feel very right.

Though I was thinking, as I walked, about how while the stillness of the desert settles me during unquiet-soul sort of days, the never-still crashing of ocean does the exact same thing. I didn’t think I could live in the desert at first, which seemed as far from that wild crashing as one can get (even though technically I was much farther away when I lived in the Midwest), until I went on a hike and understood that the desert can feel as right as the sea.

How can something utterly still and something always in motion speak to the same part of a person, and draw up the same response? Interesting question, that.