What is it about the desert that makes it the particular haunt of mystics and seers, divine teachers and lost souls? We go the desert when we need to learn about ourselves, we find ourselves in the desert when we are lost in our lives. It is both grand metaphor for growth and very literal challenge if you have spent anytime there. 

I just came back from five days in the Sonoran desert; a place I like to go to at least once a year, a place that speaks to my soul in words I don’t always understand until much later, if at all. It is a sacred space we are told, one of those ‘thin veil’ lands where it is easier to connect spiritually. And it is just in the everyday of living a stunningly beautiful place. 

It is also a harsh land. Every beautiful thing you look at has thorns or spikes or fine needle like hairs that will embed themselves in you not in a delightful way. There are incredible creatures that bite and sting and howl, and magical creatures that transform and survive in a place that freezes at night and bakes in the day. Paradise with all of the challenges of real life survival. Both/And as they say. 

On my morning walk I followed a well worn trail in most places. This is like our lives of course. Most of the time we walk the path that others have walked before us, we know which way to go to get where it is we are on our way to. Sure the scenery changes along the way, over the years, but the path is there. Except sometimes it isn’t, it wasn’t. Rain had come and the path up the hills had changed; sometimes I could see it ahead of me but how to get there was unclear. I had to choose. Often there was a cairn in the distance, a kind stranger guided me, or a tree branch was laid to block the wrong option. But now and again the path was just gone, or forked, or looked like a wash so I wasn’t one hundred percent sure. Because that’s the thing about life; very often you can’t be one hundred percent sure and you either take the risk and try, you stay stuck exactly where you, or you retreat going back the same way you came.

We come to these points in our lives over and over at different junctures and at each point we get to decide. We look for the guides, or we go it alone, we follow the path until we are unsure and then turn back, we boldly go on and maybe take a wrong turn, get into trouble. Maybe we walk with someone else and can confer along the way. Maybe we think we know exactly what to expect and then find ourselves surprised by how the landscape changes, it’s not how we remembered, or what we were told we would find. 

The literal desert as a feature of this earth, as a place where wisdom teachers have retreated to for millennia, reminds us that there will be desert times in our lives and that they have something to teach us. There will be places we have to go that are scary and unfamiliar and uncomfortable and maybe even dangerous. There will be choices we have to make without assurance of getting what we want or where we want. And there is beauty in all of this. The quiet where we can hear our heart, the dark where we can see the stars and remember the miracle of being in the universe, the shock of the cold winds and the burning sun. 

We go to the desert I think to prepare us for the wilderness that inevitably comes in life, the times when we feel a little danger and a little unsure. We go to the desert because it is not crowded with our ideas, it is happening quite successfully without our interference and it can teach us to let go. We go and we return and hopefully a little piece of sand stays in your shoe calling you to remember the lesson of going slow, being grateful, wondering what can happen when you take some time away.