If the desert teaches us one thing, it is that space affects us powerfully and deeply.

In the past 365 days I’ve spent nights in an apartment on Wall Street and an apartment in the East Village of New York City, my childhood home, a tiny house on the still improving East Side of Austin, tents here and there across America, an adobe pod in Joshua Tree, California, and most recently a renovated airplane hangar in the hill country, a trailer from 1949 in Marfa, Texas, and a dream home in the mountains of Ruidoso, New Mexico built by this woman and her family when she was sixteen and lives there alone now that most of her family is gone. The time in each of these spaces was influential and has a strong effect on how I perceive the rest of my time outside of those spaces and where I am in general during that season of life.

Wall Street felt fresh and oddly vulnerable. East Village felt lovingly grimy and oddly powerful. The tiny house was humbling and beautiful and important. My home home was a reminder of where I’d been and made me quite anxious when I was trying to figure out where I was going. The adobe pod felt like the black hole I always needed.

The most recent: the hangar that feels suppressingly creative (that’s the best way I can put it), the trailer felt like the wild things ended up finally eating you because they love you so, and the dream home felt like aspiration and final contentment.

It gets kind of emotional having to change on a dime from place to place because I tend to get kind of attached. I feel really connected to space when it is noticeably significant.

I’ve yet to spend a long amount of time at once in the hangar. Right now is one of the longest amounts of time I’ve had to sit and think about this place. The way the sun hits the long grasses; the way the surround sound really reiterates the solitariness of the country in a really beautiful and inspiring way. I’m sitting in my robe, sweats, and slippers—my glasses underneath my sunglasses—thinking about the space and why is it that we can never put our finger on its effect?

This morning I slid open the incredible iron door made by a local Austin artist and made of heavy and solid geometric shapes. The wind felt creepy and almost blew me over. Then suddenly—no joke—I heard on a loud speaker or megaphone or something: GOOD MORNING TIME TO WAKE UP. IT’S 7:15 AND IT IS GOING TO BE A BEAUTIFUL DAY. You should now know two things: 1) I am terrified my overarching voices--it feels grotesquely apocalyptic/communistic; and 2) I can only assume that this was said by a father to his sleepy son who has trouble waking, but the thing is, it simultaneously woke me up too. It for some reason reiterated a certain aspect about space and how it can make you feel really small and also like the most important person in the space. This metal dome we live in makes strange sounds. It feels oddly like I’m living in a performance art piece. Like “The Artist is Present.” For some reason I can’t shake self-awareness. I am twenty-three, I am living in this beautiful, strange, and aesthetic space, and I am happy. It feels very planned in a very beautiful but microcosmic (and self-centered) way.

My point is, space makes you feel taken care of. Four walls can be made of many things, but their purpose is always to act as fortification and when done beautifully they fortify the mind. When you can sit and think about a space before you think about other things, it allows the other-thing thoughts to be better understood and fortified. And when you are thinking you are obviously being, to some extent, a tad self-consumed (even if thinking about someone else).

The natural and built environment obviously affects human cognition and behavior. There are tons of studies on fluorescent light, communal space, etc. But space is about you. Because you are literally at the center of it and are affected (whether you know it or not) deeply by the space.

So, this last weekend we went to Marfa, Texas and White Sands National Park in New Mexico. Two places that I immediately felt painfully connected to. Marfa is made up of genuine people that felt called to this place to create and be in the desert but not alone. They want to be close to the border but not on it. They want to be in seclusion but not secluded. One could even say that they want to be trendy, but not on the nose.

White Sands doesn’t make any sense as a space and was definitely the most powerful.

Like I said, we stayed in Ruidoso, about an hour away from White Sands. Ruidoso sits on a mountain, across from an even higher mountain that has snow on the top of it more time out of the year than it doesn’t. Ruidoso is liberally peppered with tall forest pines. Ruidoso is a mountain town with log cabins that sit along a flowing river with “Bear Xing” signs. It’s a lovely and quaint town.

The drive to White Sands (again, only an hour away) is shocking. You drive past towns that look like they could be in another country as the desert gets closer. Closed down gas stations and diners. Old hotels whose signs are endearing yet forgotten—the true West. You sometimes see some beige sand—typical sand—and then in the distance you see white sand and get excited.

But after spending time in the middle of White Sands you look back on that former you (the you that had never been in the middle of it and only saw it from afar) and laugh because the white seen from far away is impressive but it is nothing compared to getting lost amidst the space of White Sands and feeling the soft, cold, pale sand padding your feet.

We took off our shoes for the entire time in the park. Guys, this sand is incredible. It is so soft and it doesn’t make sense. I read how it happened---thousands of years ago it was formed and the sand is bits of gypsum etc.—but that doesn’t explain the desert’s effect. I’ve never felt so positively…assaulted by place.

I felt calm and drunk in the desert while also feeling manic and incredibly sober. I felt like one of the specs of sand and it was humbling and a lesson to be as much in tune with what surrounds me as possible.