Joshua Tree National Monument, Twenty Nine Palms, California ….

When you first come, you wonder where you’ve landed.Where are you?

This landscape looks more like Star Wars than Mother Earth.

What kind of place can have so much sky and yet at the same time, look so desolate and forgotten?

What kind of trees are these? Are they trees? They offer no sheltering arms, no comforting green, no sweet shade in this wilderness.

The Mormons named them Joshua Trees, because they thought they looked like Joshua in the Bible as he lifted his arms up to heaven to pray.

Joshua lifted his arms before the Battle of Jericho! And the walls came tumbling down!

Joshua Tree National Monument looks like where those walls came a’tumbling down.

There are rocks everywhere – piled and random. Some people climb them.

Why bother going to the moon or outer space when you can go to Joshua Tree National Park in California? It’s amazing here.

Robert Browning once wrote — This world is full of such a number of things, I think we should all be as happy as kings.

He would have liked Joshua Tree Park.