Transmitting from the Mojave Wilderness in Joshua Tree, California, now is the time for Desert Oracle Radio, the voice of the desert.

Night has fallen on the American desert.

Oh, and it's madness out there. And the American desert. And it's madness out there in the human world.

Every now and again people get all wound up,

and the next thing you know,

they're marching down the streets and firebombing,

the cities, and wherever civilization exists, be it a shining

Greco-Roman-inspired city on a hill or the paltry low-budget version of civilization we have

in the Western sprawl. All box stores and parking lots and juice franchises and abandoned malls and hollow-eyed people on the edge of the frontage road.

Well, there comes a time when certain ones among us must escape to the wilderness.

Escape to the desert.

And I am not speaking about escaping for a yoga retreat.

I am talking about running for your life, running for your soul.

This is why ultimately and always humanity requires the desert wilderness.

Yes, it's good for the yucca and the bobcat and the underground caverns filled with cold, fresh water,

and once you learn to see with the eyes you were given, there is nothing more beautiful, more awe-inspiring as a wild

desert panorama with its attendant, strange, and wonderful species. It's cloud ships crossing

the horizon, the wind moving like gangs of ghost horses through the creosote.

When you watch a four-inch-long scorpion purposefully skittering across the patio on an August

night, that flicker of revulsion is a flashback from a film that has been running for 500 million years,

when six-foot-long sea scorpions hunted the oceans, and we are distant relations anyway.

We were the prey.

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