We frequently made trips to Wirikuta, the sacred desert of the Huichol people, in the eastern sierra south of Real, high up in the central mountains and honeycombed with ancient footpaths leading up into stony ruins.
Shedding light on villages and cities with extraordinary heritage, pastoral rolling hills, ancient olive groves, fertile valleys, sacred desert cemeteries, and vanishing archeological sites, the artist, who likes to describe himself as an 'archeologist of the present', uncovers not only what exists but what may have existed beyond the instant caught by his camera.
The Qurʾān (the Islāmic sacred scriptures) directs desert dwellers and travellers to rub themselves with high clean soil because of the scarcity of water.
An oath sworn by Athenian military recruits (ephēboi) in the 4th century includes clauses about not disgracing the sacred weapons, not deserting comrades, and not handing down a diminished fatherland (to posterity); the oath and the word ephēbe are 4th-century, but the institutionalizing of hoplite obligations and expectations is surely much older.
Opponents cited concerns such as the possible contamination of the Colorado River, which provides drinking water for millions of people, and the effects on Native American sacred sites in the desert and fragile creatures such as the California desert tortoise.
It also issued a legal opinion that could clear the way for a Nevada company to dig an open-pit gold mine in a part of the California desert considered sacred by a local Indian tribe.
Even after Fuji Photo crept into the U.S. market with lower-priced film and supplies, Kodak refused to believe Americans would ever desert its sacred brand.
Yet the desert offers sacred visions and the presence of God, once one has surrendered their own understandings and experiences of worldly comforts and symbols of false gods, or brought to the edge of life and death.
As I read and hear from religious leaders, some of my favorite ways of traversing over the 40-day period of Lent is as follows: one goes on a mysterious journey as one follows Jesus; Lent is a sacred pilgrimage into the desert of our lives accompanied by Christ's spirit.
These songs of creation and travel, called Dreamings, are passed down from generation to generation within each Aboriginal clan, serving both as historical records of their ancestors' accomplishments and as maps guiding singers across the desert to sites sacred to their clan.
In "Altneuland," the 1902 utopian novel by Zionism's founding father, Theodor Herzl, a character explains why young Jewish settlers, inexperienced farmers all, will succeed while generations of Arab peasants failed to make the desert bloom: "The sacred soil … was unproductive for others, but for us it was a good soil.
