Desert
Memories
“If you
don't die of thirst, there are blessings in the desert. You can be
pulled into limitlessness, which we all yearn for, or you can do the
beauty of minutiae, the scrimshaw of tiny and precise. The sky is
your ocean, and the crystal silence will uplift you like great gospel
music, or Neil Young.”
Anne
Lamott
The first time I drove
through the Southwest desert with my husband of six months, I was
barely twenty and leaving the nest of North Carolina for the first
time. The vastness, emptiness and frigidness (it was January) of the
winter desert sent me into deep sorrow. We ran into a snow storm just
outside Gallup, New Mexico, with snow so hard and fast it covered the
flat terrain in what seemed like minutes. The road became invisible.
I started crying then and didn't stop until we reached Sacramento
three days later. I'm sure my new husband just wanted to open the car
door and push me out somewhere near Needles, Arizona.
The second time I visited
the desert, I was closer to fifty, and I found it to be both foreign
and beautiful. We were a crowd of 120 women gathered outside Oracle,
Arizona for a week-long seminar on the Emerging Feminine—Jungian
Analysts and Native American teachers in an enormous circus tent on a
YWCA campground in the middle of nowhere. When we convened in the big
tent each morning and evening, the wind whipped the flaps and swirled
around us like a living entity. The feeling of being surrounded by
the ancestors was palpable.
After that, I made
regular trips to desert compounds to study with Carol Proudfoot, and
learned that deserts are just as different from one another, as they
are from the green mountains of my youth. Some are rocky, some have
lots of vegetation, some have only sand and saguaro cactus, some are
high mountain desert, some are oases with streams running through
them. I was ignorant, and I came to love learning all the lessons the
deserts had to teach. One of my favorite desert experiences was
sunset. As Anne Lamott states, the sky is your ocean. The sky seems
only feet above your head, and the colors are something out of this
world. They afford the same sense of limitlessness that one
experiences on the ocean when you cannot see shoreline in any
direction. There are no lights, so the night sky is a panoramic
milky-way.
One can see why the early
Christian Desert Fathers wrote about their otherworldly experiences.
Deserts feel like liminal spaces—where the worlds meet and
otherworldly experiences are the norm. Here's a little bit of Desert
Father wisdom to ponder today. It comes from Abba Anthony (3rd century):
“I saw
the snares that the enemy spreads out over the world and I said
groaning, 'What can get through such snares?' Then I heard a
voice say to me, 'Humility.'”
Good advice from beyond
the veil. If you visit the desert, any desert, be sure to pack a lot
of water, and a couple of Neil Young CD's. They'll keep you company
in the vastness of your own contemplation.
In the Spirit,
Jane
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