I wrote these reflections from the western edge of the Mojave Desert, where I returned for a two-night technology fast after a week and a half of COVID isolation. Last month I spent a week out here with a team from my conservation program fixing excursions—trails made by off-roaders that deviate from roads and routes established by the Bureau of Land Management.
As a friend of mine recently put it in a letter he wrote me, the desert is a place that guarantees “good nothingness.” During my full day out here I hiked to a rocky outcropping where I could see for miles in every direction. There was not another human in sight, only creosote, rocks, and the occassional Joshua tree. I was alone out here, a reality my body found both invigorating and unsettling. For two days the breeze was faint and gentle, thank God, and the silence was interrupted only by distant birdsong or the dull roar of an airplane in the distance.
I was worried about coming out here right after so much time in isolation. Did I really need to take my newly-won COVID antibodies out into the desert, as far away from civilization as possible? Yes, I think I did, because I needed some silence, a break from the noise of my Facebook feed and text message notifications and the constraining walls of a bedroom.
To my surprise, my leap of faith was rewarded. I showed up in the desert and found myself in a place of almost abrupt wellness. The land grounded me afresh in who I am and who I follow, and it released me, for a time, from the cares and temptations of the world. I wrote the following anecdotes while I was out there. I’m sure there is a way of finding a narrative thread or two that ties them all together. But I’ve decided to release them in the order I drafted them as a series of anecdotes and meditations, unearthed from my experience like ore that has yet to be refined but is precious and meaningful all the same.
I.
Belden Lane, a writer and theologian who has devoted much of his life’s work to exploring desert and mountain spirituality, is my guide out here. In The Solace of Fierce Landscapes, he talks about a researcher who journeyed into the Himalayas for the professional purpose of study the migratory and mating patterns of Himalayan blue sheep. His real purpose though—his soul purpose, you might say—was to stalk snow leopards, the rarest and most beautiful of the great cats.
“The snow leopard is a symbol of ultimate reality, that fleeting beauty we see only in occasional snatches,” Lane writes. He goes on to explain how our work or our job is really just a cover, and act to appease “polite society,” to give us a chance of encountering the sacred—the holy. In a culture that tempts us to make our work the measure of our worth, we often seek to find in our jobs an “ultimacy they can never provide.”
“The holy is seldom captured in the places where we seek it most,” Lane explains. “While we’re preoccupied with Himalayan blue sheep, it slips into the periphery of our vision in the furtive silhouette of a great cat.”
I read about this while I sit atop a rocky crest on the western edge of the Mojave Desert, and suddenly I feel the same metaphor come to life, except for me it is the desert tortoise. As of 2014, the latest data I can find after a quick Google search, these threatened creatures have an estimated population density of only about seven tortoises per square mile, and they spend about 95 percent of their lives underground.
I look out at the flat expanse, a spotty carpet of creosote stretching out more than 60 miles to the hills of the San Bernadino National Forest. There are maybe a few dozen tortoises walking out there now (assuming they go outside at all during the winter), just a handful of aged, sacred needles in an vast haystack that might as well be endless. Better pay attention, then, to the edges of the infinte desert where I wander. A fresh sense of meaning begins to well up in my day. I’m not out here for work; I’m out here to do nothing, to wander around without aim or goal, to give myself a chance of glimpsing a desert tortoise.
Just a chance, a tiny window through which I might—maybe, it’s a long shot—glimpse revelation.
The trick is staying present when it feels like there’s nothing to see in the desert’s mundane, repetitive landscape. “Stalking the snow leopard is not so much an exercise in grapsing the numinous as in paying attention to the prosaic,” Lane reminds me. “Full awareness of the unnoteworthy immediate moment is the grandest and hardest of all spiritual exercises.”
I want the mountaintop experience, to come out here and be utterly undone by God’s love and see my wounds healed and my fragmented heart restored. But that isn’t happening. Instead it’s just one damn creosote bush after another. Granite and sand. Droning airplanes in the distance. The only command I feel is to exist and pay attention, to wait without expectation—but not without hope.
Yes, it’s a long shot, but if I do see a desert tortoise, oh my. I will take off my shoes and fall on my face, for surely I am on holy ground.
II.
Speaking of coming out here to do nothing, it feels so risky to offer that to myself, to give myself 48 hours to simply be out in a place of “good nothingness,” with no demands no obligations on my time. It feels like a risk to be unproductive, especially after self-isolating for a week and a half to recover from COVID and not accomplishing much beyond writing a couple thousand words and making a few phone calls. It also feels like a risk to be undistracted, to put away my phone, leave my laptop at home, and go out to a place where no source of entertainment is readily forthcoming. I fear what the desert’s nothingness may hold—pain, loneliness, boredom, heartache?
To my surprise, this time it holds none of those things, at least not in any acute, heart-aching form. Instead I find myself strangely calm, oddly at peace. I move through the day slowly and patiently, utterly unhurried, and what I find is a steady outpouring of gifts. Yes, this time the desert demands nothing of me: no need to fix or restore, only receive.
It begins early, in the faint, pre-dawn light. I wake and dress and step out from my tent into the cold morning. Before I even make it to my car to prepare a cup of instant coffee, four shadows appear in the air above my camp, silhouetted against the navy blue sky. They flap their wings and dart left and right, up and down. I watch their movements, studying the contours of their shape. They don’t make a sound.
They’re bats. Bats! Flying right here of all places. Miles of desert and they pass just a few yards from me. I watch them, marvelling, until they flap out of sight into the pale pink horizon. The sun has not yet risen, and already I am a witness to one of the desert’s silent wonders.
I make my coffee. Sunrise is nearing. There is a small crest nearby covered in small, broken-up chunks of granite. It grants me a distant view to the east. I climb it and look up. Long rows of clouds have turned pink, stretching directly overhead all the way to the horizon where the rising sun has turned the sky orange and gold. There on the crest it dawns on me that I am likely the only person in at least three miles every direction. That means I am the only one who is seeing this right now. All of its particulars, the swell of pink in the cirrus clouds overhead and the burning orange blazing out above the rocky hilltops in the distance, these all are exclusive to my eyes alone. I am the sole witness—the one human recipient. What a gift. What a treasure! At this moment I might as well be the wealthiest man in the world.
Later in the evening, after the sunset almost knocks me off my feet—the sky explodes with color again so suddenly—I build a fire. As the dusk begins deepening into night, a feathery shadow emerges in the air above out of the fading landscape. This time it’s an owl making a pass above my camp. It glides like a phantom, silent as death. If I hadn’t noticed its silhouette, I’d have never known it was here.
I did not seek out these experiences. I didn’t work for them or make any effort to manufacture them. I simply came out to the desert with open hands, trusting grace to provide something but having no guarentees. In the silence, the cold, barren nothingness, the desert offered up her treasures.
That’s the thing about stalking snow leopards. You go out looking, hoping to catch a glimpse, but in the end it’s actually the leopard that’s stalking you. As Lane says, when we go out into fierce landscapes, we often discover that it’s not so much about finding truth as in being found by the Beloved. Is not that the divine way, after all? God shows up, piercing our mundane day-to-day life with a glimpse of holiness, and all we’re left with is flummoxed wonder and gratitude, “surely the Lord was here, and we knew it not!”
III.
I ponder the landscape as I walk through it. Aside from the creosote and Joshua trees, which have some green in their leaves, everything out here looks dead. The grass and underbrush is sparse, dry, and brittle. It breaks and crunches under my feet when I venture off the roads.
But I know it’s not dead. It can’t be. I mean, it’s here, for starters. It must have grown here somehow, rising up from the sand despite the arid sky, scorching summer afternoons, and freezing winter nights. Yes, life is here, latent in the land, biding its time. I’m sure one good spring rain is all it would take for the grass to turn green and the brush to flower again. In the meantime they’re patient, biding their time in the long, empty silence, not in a hurry to grow or do much of anything…until the time is ripe.
IV.
In his autobiography of coming to faith, C.S. Lewis talks about the experience of being surprised by joy in a number of experiences over the course of his early life that he describes as “unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction.” I know this joy that he speaks of, but today I was surprised by something else. I was surprised by peace. After hiking through the late morning and early afternoon I arrived back at my campsite with about an hour and a half of daylight left. I was tired from the walking, and hungry. I felt vaguely empty inside, and I wondered what I would do with myself until it got dark enough to start a fire.
Something caught my eye on the ground just behind my car. It was a small ant colony. I stooped down to look at it. The ants were moving slowly. At first glance it almost looked like they were standing still, frozen in place by some wintry spell. It was as if their little corner of the universe was caught in slow motion. They were in no hurry at all—or maybe the dropping temperature was sapping their energy. I found a raisin from some trail mix in my car, spread a picnic blanket on the ground near the ants, lay down on my stomach, and dropped the raisin nearby to see what they would do.
For a moment—I don’t know if it was fifteen minutes or an hour—the vastness of the desert faded away. I forgot about the girls I was chatting with on dating apps, the tumult at the capitol in Washington, D.C., the fear and oppression of the pandemic. There was just the ants. I watched their movements. Some latched on to the raisin, others wandered off many inches to explore the far reaches of their developed land, and some moseyed about the entrance of their colony, not seeming to do much at all. A deep peace settled over me, and in a surreal moment of self-awareness I realized that I felt content. For a wonderful few minutes the world was enough, it was enough to simply be here, watching the ants and letting my body rest from the exertions of the day. All was calm. The desert was silent. Only the ants toiled at their steady, unhurried pace. They had no worries about tomorrow. The raisin would still be there for them. All of it was enough, and there was nothing I needed to do about anything.
V.
While I was sitting on the aforementioned rocky outcropping writing a letter to a friend, an abrupt ba-BOOM errupted behind me. I started and turned around, looking for evidence of a gunshot or explosion. Overhead an F-22 Raptor, the latest-generation fighter in the United States Air Force, was streaking across the sky.
The sound had stunned me, but having identified its source I suddenly felt nonplussed. “Huh, so that’s what the speed of sound looks like,” I said to myself as the jet turned into a shrinking dot above the horizon.
I had seen a pair of the same jets flying above the desert in a broad arc earlier in the day. It was so strange, the juxtaposition of worlds that happened during these sightings. I was out here in a sparse, elemental landscape where life feels stripped down and harsh, a place where the silence of God interposes with a strange, sacred violence on the soul. Then to spot an F-22, one of the most advanced and deadly feats of engineering in human history, well, I’m not sure what to make of it. I wish they weren’t here. I wish I had the desert’s uninterrupted silence, the way it was before human development clove the sky with the roar of jet-engines. Even here, in the Mojave’s holy emptiness, I cannot fully escape the world of human kind and the weapons of destruction we have wrought. Even here—especially here—I long for the restoration of all things, for springs to burst forth in the wasteland and swords to be beaten into plowshares.
VI.
I feel compelled to commemorate my time out here with ritual. I brought a handful of communion wafers with me, blessed and distributed for use during online services by the Anglican church I used to attend. I pull one out and hold the thin, tasteless morsel in my hand. “This is the body of Christ, broken for you,” I mumble to myself. I break it into four pieces, calling on Jesus Christ to have mercy on me. I haven’t been to church in a few months, but I decide to step boldly into my identity as a priest anyways, breaking bread and consecrating the land that has held me these past two days.
I place one piece on the small hill of granite rocks, a place of contemplation, breathing, and stillness, stacking three stones on top of each other in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. I ask God to meet the next person who wanders to the top of this hill as I have.
The next piece is for the fire, warming and life-sustaining yet consuming force that it is. I’m going to become a wildland firefighter in four months, and I know that my relationship with fire will grow much more involved and complicated as a result. Already I watch the fire with a heightened attention, noticing how its flames react to the wind and spread to consume the wood I’ve assembled for fuel. It’s nearly out now, barely piercing the cold morning air with its heat. I bless the smoldering flames before me, and I bless whatever the future holds.
The third piece of the communion wafer I eat, blessing my own body and the reality that Christ dwells in me and I in him, even out here in the far wastes of the world. I’ve been reading Psalm 139 the past two days, and I call the words to mind as I partake: “Where shall I go from your Spirit? Or where shall I flee from your presence? If I ascend to heaven, you are there! If I make my bed in Sheol, you are there! If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there your hand shall lead me, and your right hand shall hold me.”
The fourth and final piece I take out to a Joshua tree growing a few hundred yards away from my camp. If anything symbolizes and defines this land and stands as its symbolic head, it is this tree right here. If there is anything out in the desert here that God loves, I know it must be this lone, solitary being. It’s the Joshua tree that Christ loved, as the Apostle John might put it. I put my hand on its trunk and bless it, praying for its flourishing, knowing that as I do so, I mysteriously pray for every other living being around me as well.
In the sand at the base of the tree I dig a little hole with my hand, feeling the gravelly soil slip through my fingers, and bury the last piece of the wafer. Deep breath. The land is still silence, still somehow both fierce and calm. I feel depths of peace. Now I can leave and return to my life, having, in some small way, lost it and found it anew.
acwords 