Is this tiny forest, devoid of leaves, desolate? Even the winter trees crackle and whisper their continued life. Bugs abound. Microorganisms teem. Not desolation, not really.
Antarctica, perhaps, could be desolate. There is some life there. Mostly too small to see. Even so, expanding our definition of desolation just a tiny bit, we may include the snow. It falls in flurries and rushes, blows this way and that, guided by the tyrannical hand of the wind. Is this truly a dead thing, the snow in the wind? It moves; it breathes; it decides where to wander next based on her physics-derived DNA.
Across continents it stores data: where was that snowflake a second ago? A minute ago? Millions of years ago? What words were spoken where no one else could hear? What did the roar of a tyrannosaurus sound like? Information past anything we grasp. And yet, one only requires the simplest of equations to reverse time.
Even space, in the epoch where I see my dying form orbiting that star, can’t truly be desolate from every point of view. Debris of all sorts, emissions from dying stars, the smashed remnants of planets and asteroids. And some snowflakes, born of the ice those asteroids carried.
A single snowflake drifts on solar wind. A thousand light years away, another twinkles in the dying light.
Swirls and flurries of snowflakes live even at the end.