There is an unaccountable solace that fierce landscapes offer to the soul. They heal as well as mirror, the brokenness we find within. Moving apprehensively into the desert's emptiness, up the mountain's height, you discover in wild terrain a metaphor of your deepest fears. If the danger is sufficient, you experience a loss of competence, a crisis of knowing that brings you to the end of yourself, to the only true place where God is met … Some people die in the desert. Others flee as quickly as possible before it can effect them in any serious way. Only a few remain long enough to discover a hard-headed, unromanticized compassion, stripped of the sentimentalism that too often substitutes for love. They are the ones who manage to sustain the terrible and the good, without compromising either one.

In reference to Chile's harsh Atacama Desert:

It had not rained for half a century there … The bare earth, plantless, waterless, is an immense puzzle. In the forests or beside rivers everything speaks to humans. The desert does not speak. I could not comprehend its tongue: its silence …