You can come to the desert but you cannot stay here

You can come to the desert, you can live here, but you cannot stay here. We knew this when we arrived in Joshua Tree, yet I doubt we knew why.

Yesterday, Aleksandra found a beautiful skull of a baby coyote, fully intact and blanched, cleaned, and preserved by the desert sun. She is right to say that the desert is suspended between life and death and, with it, so is everything else.