The desert is an eerie but fascinating place: sweltering by day and freezing cold by night, miles of clear skies, shifting sandhills and mirages that confuse our perceptions, already disturbed by aridity and emptiness, but then suddenly in the midst of this inhospitable one sandy world an oasis that miraculously saves life from dying of thirst. In a similar way it is with our inner desert, which opens up every now and then in the middle of our lives…