Taylor Quinn Outside Reading: Outside Reading: Desert Influences by Stephen Wright 12/2/10

The journal “Desert Influences” by Stephen Wright is about how people in the healthcare profession, such as nurses, often experience personal desert where they have to deal with suffer, pain, loss, and isolation on a day to day basis. The early Christian churches often go into the desert and how they have sought their own spiritual awakening by spending time in different deserts. He sought out many deserts like central Australia and northern Arizona, by himself in order that he may have his own spiritual awakening. The desert strips you of your significance and faces you with the terror of essential nothingness and leaves you asking yourself the question, who am I? Those who are in the field of nursing deal with deserts on a day-to-day basis. Their deserts are of grief, loss, and suffering. Their deserts are personal and intimate ones. They see those with Alzheimer’s where the formation of identity and what it means to be human teeters on the edge. They see those who waste away their lives with drugs and alcohol. But if those who are conscious of these deserts they can see them as place of potential awakening. It is where identity is forged, broken, and then reforged. The desert revel those who embrace this journey and the love that they carry with them.