The desert is the homeland of my heart and the landscape of my soul.

I’ve lived in the desert a good part of my life: the colorful red rock desert of Sedona, Arizona, Tucson’s Sonoran Desert of sand and saguaro friends, the high-altitude desert of the San Luis Valley in southern Colorado, where cactus grow in miniature.

I’ve traveled in the Judean Desert of the Holy Land where Jesus walked and the Negev in Israel where a few remaining Bedouin pitch their black tents, the multi-hued Mojave Desert of Death Valley, often the hottest place on earth, and the vermillion slot canyonlands of southern Utah and Nevada. And I’ve been to Petra, the ancient city in southwest Jordan cut out of enormous red rock, where I hiked through red sands to the monastery, Ad Deir.

I’ve ridden a camel into Jordan’s Wadi Rum at the top of the desert where they filmed “Lawrence of Arabia.”  Our young guide, who sang to the camels and cooked chicken on an open fire for supper under the stars, even took us to one of Lawrence’s actual campsites.

“What do you like about the desert?” a reporter asked Lawrence, who answered, “It’s clean.” He was young and flip, like that desert curmudgeon Edward Abbey, author of Desert Solitaire, whose own description of the desert was also sparse yet lyrical:

“The desert: clean air to breathe; stillness, solitude and space; a sense of time enough to let thought and feeling range from here to the end of the world and back…. The desert is a good place – clean, honest, dangerous, uncluttered, strong, open, big, vibrant with legend.”

I’ve been fascinated by the legendary deserts of the world since I was a young girl pouring through National Geographic magazines to read about the Sahara, dromedary camels, and exotic Bedouins with their heads wrapped in yards of cloth, the women in heavily embroidered dresses, wearing their heavy gold wealth in jewelry around their wrists and necks.

I read about the cold Gobi Desert in Asia, two-humped Bactrian camels, and ruddy-cheeked nomads dressed in heavy felt working outside their yurts. I fell in love with Antarctica long before I encountered Sir Ernest Shackleton, another one of my adventurous heroes. Yes, Antarctica, the largest and coldest desert in the world: an entire continent.

I was fascinated by the Bushmen from the Kalahari Desert in South Africa who cooked ostrich eggs on rocks heated by the sun and the Australian aborigines (they call themselves that) where forty percent of their country is desert, and they find their way across it by chanting the place-names in songlines. Europe is the only continent on earth without a desert.

I identified strongly with Lawrence of Arabia when I saw the David Lean film about him in 1962 as a high school senior. From then on, I’ve longed to ride a camel in the vast Saharan Desert of North Africa and sleep under those incomparable bright stars. Will I ever get there?

The closest I’ve come is hiking in the Great Sand Dunes near my hermitage in Crestone, Colorado, before they became a national park. Soon after I moved to Crestone, lamenting the loss of Sedona in my life, friends took me to these dunes an hour away. They seemed as close as I would ever get to the Sahara.

I looked at the expanse of sand before me and exclaimed, “Finding this makes up for losing Sedona.” As I wandered the dunes over the next thirty years with friends, my young niece and nephews, with students from the classes on desert spirituality Dave Denny and I taught at Colorado College, and especially by myself, I always looked for a concaved spot where I lost sight of the surrounding mountains and saw only sand and sky.

Going to the desert feels like coming home – to myself. I recognize the outer landscape of the desert as a mirror of my inner soulscape. I do not find the desert barren but a perfect embodiment of what my Buddhist friends mean by sunyata: infinite spaciousness.

And my life’s “work” is cultivating a heart as spacious as the desert: wide open to every direction of the compass and every creature who lives there: animal, vegetable, and mineral as well as human, and wide open to the One who created it all.

Can you recognize me with my camel and my singing guide, camped overnight in Wadi Rum in Jordan?