The desert experience.

Going to the Desert

“…My soul leads me into the desert, into the desert of my own self…The journey leads through hot sand, slowly wading without a visible goal to hope for…”

                                  Carl Jung (The Red Book)

“He led me back and forth among them, and I saw a great many bones on the floor of the valley, bones that were very dry…”

                                  Ezekiel 37:2

“Then Jesus was led by the spirit into the desert to be tempted by the devil.”

                                  Matthew 4:1

         Back in the mid-nineties, I was part of a circle of women who studied with a Native American teacher.  We met several times in desert compounds.  Being from the mountains of North Carolina, I had never been in a desert, except to pass through on my way to California.  I was fully ignorant, thinking all deserts were the same; they are not.  One thing, however, that they have in common is silence.  There is quietness in the desert that one does not find anywhere else---the wind is just about the only sound except at night, when the coyotes sing to one another.  If you want to spend time in solitude thinking about your life, the desert is a good place to do it. 

         Being called into the desert by spirit, or soul, is a daunting experience.  The deserts of our lives are usually places we would not visit by choice, because there life is stripped down to its most elemental form.  We would go only because we had no choice.  Deserts like fear, depression, anxiety, loss, grief, feel like valleys of dry bones.  I’m sure many of the people who have survived the tornadoes and floods of the past month are having their desert experience.  It is difficult when you’re there to see past it; difficult to discern a visible goal to hope for.

         It is well to remember that it is spirit who calls us into the deserts of life.  Wandering in the desert, it’s hard to have an inflated ego.  All the Ph.D’s in the world don’t do you much good.  You may have been a CEO in the green world, but the desert doesn’t care.  Slowly but surely, you drop the veils of illusion that blind you to reality, and get acquainted with the self who lives inside your skin, and the Self who knows the way out of the desert.  When you come out, you are a different person, more solid and grounded, more self-assured.

         I was once in the desert when it rained.  In the course of an hour, everything that once was dry as a bone became green and bloomed.  The desert is a fertile, opportunistic place.  It’s ready to seize any opening to burst forth in an amazingly fruitful way.  The biggest, juiciest peaches I’ve ever eaten were grown in the desert, and that’s saying something for one who lives in peach country.

                                  In all things give thanks,

                                  Jane