I was forty-six when I first saw the desert and I’ve never been the same since. The lush, green landscapes I had known all my life peeled away. What was left was spare in all ways. Few plants, few colors, nothing to impede light, air so hot it became a presence, a sky so blue it’s incandescent.
In that bright, fiery world, I felt that some large truth was hovering, and here was the only place I would find it. I knew I would go back.
Which I have. That first visit was in southern Utah. I’ve been back again and again. Been to deserts in California, Nevada, New Mexico, Arizona. I’m in the Anza Borrego Desert in Southern California right now. It was here that the inspiration — better said, the direction — to start The Soul of the Earth came. On March 30, 2015, I published my first post. About, of course, being in the desert.
These dry, open, radiant, hot places are like that — you get directions, if not directives. Moses was neither the first nor the last to discover this, only the best known. There are burning bushes everywhere. As you walk among them, you don’t even need to ask questions. Answers resound off the canyon walls. And yet, one of the draws of the desert is its utter quietness. That’s why you can hear the answers.
I couldn’t live here, even though I sometimes want to. Once, my eyes got so dry the vision in my right was impaired until I returned to the moister air of coastal California. I would miss the green leafiness, the rain, the forests, the coolness of my home mountains. But I need to keep coming back.
I need the spareness, the quiet. I love the spicy scent of juniper and sage. The brown, rocky mountains turning blue at the end of the day. I want to hear the demanding caw of ravens, the liquid cooing of white-winged doves, the joyful litany of mockingbirds. The skittering of lizards and beetles. I long to walk among the footprints and lines that tell me I dwell with mysteries.
I want to feel that I will once again be hiking a canyon at sunset. That coyotes will start calling as the air cools and turns blue. I need to check in with the flowers, make time to treasure whatever the rains have brought. Some years abundance, some, like this dry year, almost nothing. But the desert remains — rocky, mysterious, imperturbable, lit from within and without. Important lessons.
And yes, truths do come. Not because the desert contains them, but because it’s here that you discover you contain them.
To all of you who have accompanied me on this journey, my profoundest thanks. In celebration, here is a desert gathering: the essays inspired by being in various deserts and the photo galleries inspired by their other-worldly beauty. Disappearing into a Beautiful Void was the first, published 10 years ago on March 30, 2015.
Mystery, beauty, wisdom
DISAPPEARING INTO A BEAUTIFUL VOID
I love to tell people I’m going to the Anza Borrego desert. They never know where it is. Even Californians and it’s most of southern Cali east of San Diego. So, with the lilting name and its complete invisibility, there’s a nice mystery to it, like I’m disappearing into a beautiful void.
It started with a lot of mysterious lines showing up in the sand. It became a meditation on walking among the profound mysteries we find everywhere, woven together by more than our interlacing footprints.
One of the earliest — and among the most personal — of my essays, about the uncanny ways the desert brings us to herself to reveal ourselves.
The Utah desert sky is a blue so incandescent it could easily burst into flames any moment and start raining stone tablets. As it apparently has been doing for eons. They have our history on them. And they tell us how to live on the planet we share with them.
I couldn’t believe my eyes when I first saw the exquisite flowers that spiny, ungainly cacti produce. I’ve since learned to love these amazingly adaptive beings. They now help form their landscape, but along the way, the landscape formed them.
