Finding Our Deserts
...finding ourselves
From ancient times, people have gone into deserts for spiritual renewal. Today, seems there are too many deserts and not enough space, or maybe it’s just that they are too far away or too close to be seen. The deserts are everywhere and growing, and nowhere to be found, or they aren’t really deserts at all because the technologists have done everything possible to ensure our complicity in technological omnipresence and the noise and distraction it generates.
But there is a desert to be found there, too. It’s shaped like an “off” button. We just have to go there and see where it takes us.
We seek the desert to escape the noise and the hubbub of our villages, whatever that might mean for us, and to leave behind the constant calls on our attention that such noise brings. At a minimum, we need a moment’s quiet if we are ever to really hear anything, even ourselves, and my observation is that often in such quiet moments our voices gather power.
The active ingredient in desert medicine is solitude. The metaphysics of solitude dictate that if we go deeply enough into it, we will circle round again and find connection. Going deeply enough to derive that benefit can be a challenge because of all the letting go it requires of us.
So the question I find myself asking as last night’s spring rain now enlivens every cell of every living piece of vegetation toward immediate growth and green — the very opposite, it would seem, of a desert — is how to find the renewal and connection of desert solitude just as all of us creatures are collectively poking our heads out of our burrows in the morning light and testing the air with hopeful noses seeking freshness, abundance, nourishment and love. I find the desert absence improves my perception of these other presences, just as solitude helps me better appreciate companionship.
For me, of course, the first desert I encountered this morning was the blankness of the screen in front of me, now filling with words. Letting go of other people’s words and finding my own is part of the practice here, the inward journey of connection, and it always seems to start by taking a fuller measure of my own desolation. The real magic of an encounter with the desert, wherever we find it, is that any such exposure of sufficient intensity or duration can guide us toward our own abandoned places. There, with patience, we may hear them speak, or at least feel in their presence the thing that has gone unsaid.
The twenty-third bite of chocolate.
That’s the thought that emerged from my inner desert landscape just now. Thinking about how after that many bites, the thing most craved is…not another. When we say ‘no' to one thing, whether we are aware of it or not, we are also saying ‘yes’ to something else — even if, and perhaps especially if, we aren’t sure what it is just yet.
The bite not taken, like the “off button,” can be a step into the vastness. A small step, but these things count. We can feel into such blessed absences. As we do, they can expand in their reach and depth and implications.
Cessation at all scales brings new things, from the micro-respite hidden within our hearts’ lub-dub, lub-dub, lub-dub to the lengthy sojourns that take us far from home for years.
And by the way, how exactly does a pause get pregnant, anyhow?
Just a guess, the answers to such questions will probably found in the desert. We’ll find the answers there because in the end that’s where we’ll find ourselves.