The name is perfect: Sanctuary Cove. The sign calls it “ A still place in a turning world.” This is truly a quiet sanctuary in the middle of the city, a circle of rock like you’d see on the coast, but protecting an ocean of saguaros instead of a sandy beach.

There’s a labyrinth, hiking trails, a small outdoor amphitheater where they celebrate an Easter sunrise service, and a stark stone chapel. I find its nakedness compelling. There’s no ornamentation. Inside the chapel I feel like I’m in the tomb with Jesus.

I’m here for a brief retreat. No technology, no goals, no productivity. I walk and read a little. I prepare simple meals. And mostly I just sit: I stop, look, and listen.

I watch a little gray bird build her nest for hours in a thorn bush swaying in the breeze and marvel at how carefully she packs the twigs. She gets so used to my sitting there as part of the landscape, she takes shortcuts and flies right over my head across the open patio, stalks of dried brittlebush in her beak. Her mate stays close but doesn’t help. He sings to her and the other birds to claim this as his territory.

I listen to the mating calls of the mourning doves and the harsh cries of the thrasher and gilded woodpecker, the bees humming in the prolific palo verde blossoms. I discover another nest on the southwest pillar of the patio with a quiet dove already sitting on her eggs. I see a ground squirrel come out of his hole and look for food, finding little.

And through it all, stately saguaros stand like silent sentinels, keeping watch over me like guardian angels. A few of them are blooming, and a few yellow prickly pears. The hedgehog cactus should be covered in spectacular pink and magenta blossoms but languish dry and shriveled instead. There’s not a single wildflower, although this was a lush garden during our “superbloom” two years ago. Last fall and winter we didn’t get any “female rain,” as the Navajos call it, so we are in serious drought. A hot wind blows, and the dust rises. The temperature soars to 100 degrees. Time to go inside.

I’ve been to the Judean Desert where Jesus spent forty days, inspiration for our forty days of Lent. No saguaros or palo verde trees there. And no air-conditioned cottage either. I feel like a sissy, but I know my limits. And I don’t believe in what Thomas Merton called “strong-man asceticism.” (Jesus wasn’t being a strong-man ascetic, though some of the early Desert Fathers and Mothers were.)

I spend more hours watching the mountain towering above the cove, a brown hunk of rock affectionately known as “Sombrero” to those of us who live here. I remember Derek Mahon’s poem about “listening to the sob story of a stone on the road.”

And I recall the hard-won wisdom of Belden Lane, who asked, “How did the wild canyon cliff change when your world fell apart?” Lane discovered the “solace of fierce landscapes,” a mystery I’ve known for a long time but can’t fathom and don’t need to. As Lane described in his seminal work on desert-mountain spirituality, wild landscapes remain constant in their immensity and majesty, no matter what happens to us, and can become a source of comfort.

I find this strangely consoling in our strangely “turning world.”