I just came back from a week in the warmest place on earth.
Not just warm in temperature—though the sun had a way of making even the wind feel hot—but warm in color.
West Texas brown.
I will be showing you photos soon. Lots of brown.
Brown like the first leather jacket you bought that still smells faintly of smoke and rain.
Brown like the coffee that greets you before words do.
Brown like the dirt under your fingernails when you’ve been in one place long enough to matter.
Brown like the slow exhale of a late afternoon when the shadows have finally given up trying to keep you cool.
The palette was endless.
Tan, leather, coffee, chocolate, cocoa, dirt, copper, auburn, bronze…
And still, I can feel there are more shades I haven’t named yet—more colors that lived in the cracks of the mesas and the folds of the canyons.
Colors you can’t buy in a paint store. Colors you have to breathe in.
Five days of this.
Five days of colors that didn’t just sit on the surface—they seeped in.
Into skin. Into thought. Into memory.
The earth itself seemed to be speaking in these tones.
If the desert had a voice, it would not be green, or blue, or white.
It would be low and rough, worn and wise—an ochre voice.
It would sound like sandpaper, like the slow drag of a boot heel across gravel.
Warm colors, warm light, warm silence.
You could almost believe that brown was the original color of destiny.
That somewhere, buried in the red clay and the rusted fence posts, there’s a record of everything that’s ever happened.
Every birth.
Every goodbye.
Every handshake deal sealed under the sun.
Brown carries history like a river carries silt—it doesn’t just pass it along, it becomes it.
And maybe that’s why, in West Texas, you don’t rush.
You move at the speed of erosion.
At the pace of wind carving stone.
The colors demand it.
Because these aren’t colors that flirt and then leave.
They are colors that commit.
They stain.
They stay.
I’ve been to places where the colors are loud, insistent—screaming their presence.
Not here.
Here, the colors are steady.
Patient.
They let you come to them.
And once you do, they don’t let you go.
There’s grit here, in every sense.
Not just in the way sand gets between your teeth, but in the way life holds on.
A mesquite tree clawing its way out of rock.
A half-collapsed barn still refusing to fall.
A water trough that hasn’t seen rain in months, still waiting, like it believes something will happen.
This is the brown of humanity, too.
Not the polished kind, but the kind with calluses and sunburn.
The kind that doesn’t need to be told the value of work.
The kind that has buried friends, rebuilt fences, and kept going.
Mortality lives in these colors.
Not in a morbid way, but in an honest way.
The way a rusted nail tells you it once held something important.
The way a faded sign lets you know it has been standing longer than most of the people who read it.
Brown doesn’t lie.
It doesn’t pretend.
It wears its years in plain sight.
And that’s the thing about earth colors—they remind you that you are temporary.
That all your bright blues and fresh whites will one day dull into this same range of hues.
That in the end, we are all just future soil.
I didn’t take these photos on the trip—I just got back last night.
But the pictures I have here are the exact tones I carried home in my head.
The tones of West Texas in August.
The tones of a place that doesn’t care who you are, but will welcome you anyway.
Out there, the horizon doesn’t just stretch—it swallows.
It pulls you forward and outward until you lose track of where you started.
Your watch feels wrong.
Your phone feels useless.
Even your name feels like it belongs to someone who lives elsewhere.
In the afternoons, the air smells faintly of sun-baked metal.
You can taste the dryness in your mouth before you even sip water.
The heat doesn’t just sit on your skin—it presses in, the way a heavy blanket does when you’re too tired to move.
And still, it feels good.
Not because it’s comfortable, but because it’s honest.
Because the same sun that makes the copper canyon walls glow is the one that makes your shirt cling to your back.
You can’t have one without the other.
That’s what I love about the desert—it doesn’t negotiate.
It doesn’t offer comfort without cost.
You take the heat, you get the color.
You take the dust, you get the sunsets.
I think about the people who have lived here for generations, their eyes trained to read the land like a book.
They know the shades of brown that mean rain is coming.
They know the exact moment when gold tips into amber before the sun drops.
They don’t just see these colors—they rely on them.
For me, it was a week of immersion.
Not in water, but in earth.
I felt myself settling into a different kind of time.
Slower.
Wider.
Deeper.
Maybe that’s what these colors do—they widen you.
They give you room to think, to remember, to forget.
Room to imagine what it would be like to stay.
If I close my eyes now, I can still see the bronze rim of the mountains at dawn.
The way the light hit them so gently it was like the day was asking permission to begin.
I can still see the copper threads running through a dry riverbed, glinting like coins no one bothered to pick up.
I can still see the way the tan dust curled behind my tires on an empty road, a ribbon I was unspooling across the land.
It’s strange, the way color can hold emotion.
The way brown can feel like both an ending and a beginning.
The way a warm palette can make you feel less alone, even in the most solitary of places.
West Texas will do that to you.
It’ll teach you that beauty isn’t always about contrast or spectacle.
Sometimes it’s about subtlety.
About the way one shade of earth slides almost imperceptibly into another.
About the way the whole scene hums at a low, steady frequency you don’t notice until you leave—and then you can’t stop hearing it.
And now I’m home, but the colors followed me.
They’ve stained the inside of my eyes.
They’ve altered the way I’ll look at everything else.
For a while, at least, I’ll be measuring the world in shades of leather and dust, in the copper light of late afternoon, in the cocoa dark of a desert night.
Brown is not flashy.
It will never trend.
It will never demand your attention in a crowded room.
But it will hold you.
It will remind you of what lasts.
It will whisper—quiet but unshakable—that everything ends up here, in the colors of the earth.
And that, somehow, is comforting.
Click.
Jack.
