The Non-Ordinary – Part VII: Connecting With Place – Desert

Naked Beauty

The desert is a wild place, at times conjuring up images of hungry jackals and ruthless scavengers. It’s also a place of naked beauty, the kind of stripped down to bare bones beauty that speaks of truth and authenticity.

The desert mothers and fathers resorted to the wilderness in their quest to safeguard the authentic spirituality they were experiencing. Those who love the desert still find a safeguard there for what is authentic. It is in that stripped down place of simplicity that we can most readily see what is truly valuable and find it possible to escape the incessant pull of the “shoulds” and the structural institutionalism that threatens to choke out life, where we find the treasure of solitude in what seems outwardly a desolate corner of the world, but inside the veil, is a silent beauty.

I was conceived in the desert. I sometimes feel like a desert seed, like something that lies dormant for what seems eons, waiting for the scent of water to bring life, certain that once in full bloom, the result will be glorious – the hope of transformation.

I often wonder if this primordial origin in the core of my being, this seed of desert, is responsible for the low tolerance I have for what is not real, for the longing for bare bones.

It reminds me of the lines from Rilke’s “Ninth Elegy,” “And so we drive ourselves, want to achieve it, want to hold it in our simple hands, in the surfeited gaze and in the speechless heart, want to become it…” That’s how wildness calls to me, calls to me to become it. I want to become the desert. If not, then at least be a voice in the desert– a voice crying in the wilderness.

For writers, being a voice in the desert involves finding our own root voice. It is the first step moving us away from the voice purchased at a bargain price, venturing into “terra incognito” toward the costly voice that may involve “animal skins and locusts.” And, at times, it involves grabbing hold of the stripped down and authentic piece of stone ledge at the very edge of the known world.

The desert is fierce. I once hiked the Red Rock Canyon in Nevada in the summer time. You must have an adequate supply of water to venture out on this kind of trek. The burning heat soon zaps your energy and you can easily become dehydrated. There is virtually no shade to be found. It’s just you out there in the elements. It brings up thoughts of terror, which Joseph Campbell sites in his book Myths to Live By as one of two basic human emotions and links it inextricably to our mortality. Perhaps this is what is meant by bare bones.

What is the desert to you?

Writing Prompt for the Week: Terra Incognito