“There is something about the desert,” wrote Edward Abbey after living in the red rock canyonlands of southern Utah. “There is something there which the mountains, no matter how grand and beautiful, lack; which the sea, no matter how shining and vast and old, does not have.”

“Life nowhere appears so brave, so bright, so full of oracle and miracle as in the desert,” he continued. And beautiful, I always add. “The desert has mothered magic things,” wrote John Steinbeck as he traveled the country with his dog Charley.

“I have lost my way many times in this world, only to return to these rounded shimmering hills and see myself recreated and more beautiful than I could ever believe,” sings Muscogee poet, Joy Harjo, first Native American Poet Laureate of the United States, who served three terms from 2019-2022. “If you look with the mind of the swirling earth… you become the land, beautiful.”

Sacred Beauty

“The white man sees desolation and calls it a desert,” explained western novelist Tony Hillerman, but the Navajo name for desert means “Beautiful Valley.” The Tohono O’odham in the Sonoran Desert where I live call it “bright shining place.”

Death Valley is the official name for the vast expanse of sand, rock, and salt flats in southeastern California because of the number of early pioneers who perished there. But the Shoshone People native to that land call it and themselves Timbisha, after the sacred red pigment found in the surrounding mountains. For the Timbisha Shoshone, the land is not dead but alive.

Utah resident Terry Tempest Williams also finds red earth beautiful – and sacred. One of the few women to write prolifically about the desert, she wrote in Red, “If the desert is holy, it is because it is a forgotten place that allows us to remember the sacred.”

Silence and Perspective

The desert’s sacredness arises from its silence. “I became aware of an immense silence in which I lost myself,” said Abbey. “The crystal silence will uplift you,” said Anne Lamott – if it doesn’t unhinge you like it did Kim Haines-Eitzen. When Kim went to Death Valley to record its silence for her study on sonorous deserts, she found the stillness in Titus Canyon unsettling and began to clap, “just to hear in the still air reverberations against canyon walls.”

She asks, “Might we think of silence not as absence [of noise] but as the fullness of quiet, a blooming attention, moments where time slows?” She quotes Native American writer N. Scott Momaday: “Silence… is the dimension in which ordinary and extraordinary events take their proper places.” I call this perspective. The desert gives us perspective, especially on who we are.

There is no place to hide in the vast empty landscape of the desert. “This desert hides nothing,” says Ellen Malloy, who also lived in the red rocks and sands of southern Utah. As she described her desert’s “bare, sensuous slickrock, labyrinthine canyons, blue islands of mountains, the omnipresent ghosts of wind and water, the extreme clarity of light,” she called this a “perfect crucible” for the “ecstasy and despair of solitude, the delicious terror of becoming lost.” Out there she felt like “a small dot and a big voyeur…. The sky and open desert are so enormous around us, who would know if we were out here anywhere?”

Humility

A camel driver from North Africa responds the same way: “I’ve crossed these sands many times,” he said one night, “But the desert is so huge, and the horizons so distant, that they make a person feel small, as if he should remain silent.” As we come to understand our little place in the cosmic order, we learn this kind of humility.

After her visit to the Mohave Desert, city dweller Meg Bernhard wrote, “[There we] are reminded of… our transience [impermanence]. This is the meaning of geological time. Our bodies will die… but the rocks and sand will go on.” Do you find this sad or consoling?

In his seminal work, The Solace of Fierce Landscapes, Belden Lane explains how the “seeming indifference” of the wilderness brings us consolation. “How did the wild canyon cliff change when your world fell apart?” he asked himself from the desert of the nursing home where his mother lay dying. The cliff remained constant in its immensity and majesty. The vast emptiness of the wilderness invites us to let go. It teaches us not to take ourselves so seriously.

Intimacy with the Desert, Pilgrimage to the Self

Bernhard titled her article in the New York Times online magazine, “The Desert Changed My Life. It Can Change Yours, Too.” The desert reminded her that she was small and mortal. And she learned the ecological dimension of time in the desert which teaches us “to exist within this ecosystem, affirming we are of the landscape, not apart.”

Terry Tempest Williams echoes this wisdom and then emphasizes the social ramifications of connecting with the desert: “For me, it always comes back to the land,” she said in an interview. “What we perceive as non-human outside of us, is actually in direct relationship with us. I think our lack of intimacy with the land has initiated a lack of intimacy with each other.”

“Every pilgrimage to the desert is a pilgrimage to the self,” she wrote in Red. “The desert makes me feel like myself, and I like that,” said Georgia O’Keeffe, who painted the desert around Abiquiu, New Mexico. Georgia liked what she learned about herself there. But what happens when the desert reveals what we don’t like about ourselves? The desert is demanding and challenging: “It can swallow you up emotionally as well as spiritually,” said Carmelite friar Edward Leahy:

There are times when your inner self seems like a battlefield where a struggle is taking place…. The desert is not for the incurable romantic. Nor is it a refuge for the hyper-sensitive who quiver painfully at the least contact with the unpleasant. It is a place of challenge, but a challenge that can open up to tremendous spiritual gain.

Mary Earle agrees in her study of the Desert Mothers who populated the sands of Egypt, Syria, and Palestine along with the Desert Fathers in the first centuries of the Christian wisdom tradition:

The desert tradition is not for cowards or spiritual gadabouts. It is a tradition that cuts to the chase…. The desert will call us to be real… [In] a sparse landscape, it is hard to fool ourselves. In an empty natural setting, we come face to face with our own limitations and mortality and with the fact of our creaturely dependence. The desert spaces help us strip away illusions and lies…. The desert is a place of transformation, transformation often occurring when we least expect it and coming to us in forms that we would never have chosen.

The Inner Desert

Many of these insights come from “desert rats,” people who love what the desert teaches because they’ve lived there. But not all of us are called to live in the physical desert. So we need to focus more on the inner desert where each one of us will sooner or later venture, the desert as a state of soul, an empty space for solitude and “testing.” Not everyone can or should live like a hermit as I do. But no one can do without an inner hermitage, a “cave of the heart,” where we encounter Divine Presence.

The word “desert” fundamentally expresses the search for God in silence. (Even the “secular” Edward Abbey calls the desert the locus Dei, “the place of God.”) For most of us, the desert is not the wilderness of the Sahara, explains Benedictine monk Jean LeClerq, but “time to be alone with God. We all have the desert in our everyday lives. The sand and sun and heat and lack of water may take different forms, but we all experience them.” These include illness, loss, deprivations, mental anguish, addiction, abandonment, and loneliness.

In this sense, the desert can be anywhere. “The desert is not remote in southern tropics,” wrote poet T.S. Eliot: the desert is around the corner, the desert rides the train next to you, “the desert is in the heart of your brother.” As New England poet Robert Frost believed:

They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars – on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer to home
To scare myself with my own desert places.

Desert Journey to the Promised Land

Whether these “desert places” are physical or more interior, we do not end up settling there, we pass through, driven by the Spirit towards the Promised Land like the ancient Hebrews crossing the Sinai Desert. But this new land is “only promised to those who are able to chew sand for forty years without doubting their invitation to the feast at the end,” laments Alessandro Pronzato, who was never the same after his own journey to the desert. William McNamara, my own root teacher, sums it up well:

The desert experience is a long, arduous trek through purgation into Paradise. It begins with the free, deliberate decision to suffer; it ends with the uproariously happy surprise of being in harmony with the universe, in the glory of God’s presence, and incalculably in love with all that is.

I’ve found this to be true in every visit I’ve made to the physical desert, in every interior desert struggle that laid me waste and filled my mouth with sand. So I love to proclaim,

Whether you live in the Sahara or San Francisco, the Mojave or Madagascar, the Gobi or Galway Bay, the call of the desert is the same. You do not have to experience the geographical desert. Through the prophet Hosea, we hear God’s call to the intimate depths of every human heart: “I will lead you into the desert, and there I will speak to your heart.”