When I lived in Turkey I learned a saying which captures how I felt when I traveled to the American desert for the first time, Dilimin sınırları, dünyamın sınırlarıdır - The limits of my language are the limits of my world. When I first entered the world of the desert, I might as well have gone to a new country because the landscape was as foreign to me as Turkey’s Taurus mountains had been when I first arrived there.

In our first few months of travel in the West I felt like a toddler, pointing out every new shape and exclaiming with excitement, “There’s another cactus!” This vast new space provided more questions than answers. How did the desert work? How did animals survive or plants bloom? Why were washes given names? As for cacti, I could only label every pointy plant a “cactus” and I even had to look up the plural—cactuses or cacti. Either is fine, by the way.

On our way out of Oregon, we visited our first one, a “cold desert,” the Alvord Desert in Eastern Oregon. Alvord is so dry it looks like a chalky white dried lake bed. It is an anomaly to the alpine land just west of it, but Alvord is in a rain shadow created by mountain ranges: Coastal, Cascade, and the adjacent Steens Mountains. As we were driving alongside this dry desert basin to the Alvord Hot Springs were we were camping, countless yellow flowers inexplicably lined the road. How did they get here? We both came up with all kinds of crazy theories. Someone planted them? Rain runoff from the road? Little did we know that these little flowers would be everywhere we went.

Native American biologist and author, Robin Wall Kimmerer, wrote in her book Braiding Sweetgrass “Paying attention is a form of reciprocity with the living world, receiving the gifts with open eyes and open heart.” I wanted to connect more deeply and to understand this strange land. The desert endures. In it I feel impermanent, a visitor who wants to interact, but the desert is too sleepy in the winter to care about me. I wondered if, by knowing more, I could belong.

Here I feel a silence I’ve only ever experienced after a snowfall in New England. The snow muffles sound in a cozy way, as if I were snuggled beneath a blanket. But in the desert, I feel just the opposite. I am open wide, at the center of all things. Sometimes scents arise, mysterious to me because I can’t always see blooms. I rub leaves trying to find the source. Lots of sage, of course, but other scents too. One shrub actually smells like cheddar and I learned it is called cheesebush. Sometimes the birds are plentiful and other times I have to look carefully. The only constant has been the raven. No wonder they figure into so many indigenous stories. Stay here long enough and you begin to talk back to them. Longer still and you will understand the raven’s response.

In the first month, as we drove in and out of desert landscapes, a tough looking dark green bush caught my eye. I was finally able to identify it while on an interpretive walk in the Valley of the Ancients, the creosote bush. Even more ubiquitous than the yellow brittlebush, the creosote sometimes takes over an area and is the only obvious plant. As a New Englander who admires grit, this scrappy bush has earned the title of one of my favorite desert plants.

We hope to visit the "King Clone" creosote ring in the Mojave Desert. An estimated 11,700 years old, it is one of the oldest living organisms on Earth.

Another Turkish language saying is also appropriate for this journey. Başka bir dile sahip olmak, ikinci bir ruha sahip olmaktır - To have another language is to possess a second soul. When we stayed in Hovenweep National Monument we both felt the soul of that land. Here man-made ruins stand in stark contrast to the immortal feel of the land. The sky, canyons, and space surround you and it’s so quiet. At night it’s just sky and stars. Here, ancestral Puebloans built homes into the land fifteen hundred years ago. Empty facades are all that is left of man, but this wonderful, stoic land remains.

About a month later, Dwayne and I camped northwest of Tucson on BLM land, in what felt like the heart of the Sonoran Desert. We decided that the only way to truly understand this soulful space was to speak back. So when we drove to the nearby Saguaro National Park, we bought a little picture dictionary of the most common desert plants.

Like travelers in a new land, we took our dictionary with us each evening on our sunset walk, identifying and naming plants as we explored. In this way, the desert opened up in a whole new way. One evening I recorded a meditation trying out my new words. You can hear how I trip over a couple of them because they were still so new!

With each desert we visit, we grow more intimate with this land. We begin to understand that as enduring as the desert seems, it is fragile too.

Joshua National Park is roughly the size of Rhode Island so we decided to visit it in segments. In the northern part, from the town of Joshua Tree, it is easy to find the plant this park is named after. However, when we entered from the south, yucca plants were only a couple feet. We drove for nearly an hour before spotting even one Joshua Tree. We learned that this is because they are threatened by two climate change’s threats of increasing wildfires and rising average temperatures. Outside the park, they are going away even more rapidly because they are losing their habitats to development.

In her gorgeous book, Red: Passion and Patience in the Desert, author and conservationist, Terry Tempest Willams calls the desert “our natural heritage.” I get that now. So many of us live and play here. About 30 percent of the US is desert. In fact, about 12 million people call the Sonoran desert—where we are now—home. This complex, fragile system is much, much more than dirt and sun. I am beginning to share Williams’ love of this nationally important landscape. Even in my short time here, I’ve learned that the desert opens to anyone willing to learn her language. I will never be the same, for as the Turks say, this second soul is within me.