Three years ago I ventured down to Joshua Tree, California for a winter camping trip.

I arrived in Yucca Valley just after the sun had set and a deep blueberry-toned sky was illuminating the Joshua Trees. The stars were beginning to appear as I drove down a dirt road searching for a place to sleep.

I parked my car and ventured into the canyon, scrambling across the cool rocks sparkling in the half-moon.

A dry winter wind set foot through the canyon and I felt it bounce from the rocks to my skin, and then back into the void of the night sky. I felt I was on the edge of the world and yet completely held by a force I could not name.

Each gust of wind felt like it carried a message that I had been brought here to receive, like the acute feeling of picking up on an ancient scent calling me into the desert — one that many before me had also been called to follow.

Morning #1 In the Desert: Awakening To Profound Silence

The next day I woke to a profound silence in the surrounding environment. I watched the sky awaken and felt the external silence enter me. I wanted to bottle this spacious feeling and take it back home. But the desert laughed at this idea, saying, No dear, that you cannot do.

In this state of wonder and craze, of clarity and yearning, a poem cut through me.

I have since only lightly edited the poem below, drawing on Natalie Goldberg’s idea of “first thoughts,” which come to us with tremendous energy.

Sitting in Yucca Valley

Wind speaks through this sparse vast canyon 
once only a whisper now loudest among 
this desert where my bones know 

a message waits for me here

it’s tangled in these Joshua trees and
a stillness where I say my name and 
it echoes back with immediacy

reverberates from God 
to the rock
to my core

simple land of extremes no distraction 
the markings screaming out that a 
higher power is at play —

here I am one with that
here I am free of redundant noise 
a vessel for the messages of the wind.

In morning before a sound, sky awakens 
a mystical blue in the hour of cacti and
one praying mantis walking atop my tent

I sit on a fallen Joshua tree 
for those who cannot sit, waiting 
for my transmission, opening 

to the desert’s mysteries

I put my pen down and cried. I would not have time on this trip to get my full transmission. I would need patience, the desert said.

Desert As Quiet, Wise Elder

It has been three years since this first experience when the desert spoke to me.

Three years in an imperfect dance of balancing my life in the developed world and trying to carve out space to go back and listen.

Last week was one of those moments when I ventured into the deserts of Arizona, hoping the desert would speak with me again.

First I visited Sedona, yet as majestic and vast as the cliffs were, they would not speak with me. Housing developments were encroaching on the foothills of the mountains and when I asked what the cliffs wanted — they said quiet.

I did not push the conversation further and realized I would need to return in springtime when the weather was warm enough to sleep beside the cliffs.

In reverence and confusion, I left and drove south towards Tucson.

Saguaro: Guardian of the Sonoran Desert

Two days later, I drove into Arizona’s Saguaro National Park, unsure what I would find.

Leaving the boundaries of Tucson and entering Tucson Mountain Park, the landscape changed drastically and suddenly. I felt an immediate intimacy with the Saguaro cacti as though I was in the company of old friends. Later, I learned these cacti are known as the guardians of the Sonoran desert.

Refer a friend

I am, of course, not the first person to be struck by the mysterious spirit of this land, which has been stewarded by the Tohono O’odham (Papago), Kimel O’odham (Pima), Hia c-ed O’odham (Sand Papago), and Seri tribes, among others.

The Hia-Ced O'odham people, called “Sand People” by the Spanish, were known for their nomadic lifestyle as they searched for water in the parched Sonoran Desert and survived amid this fierce and extreme terrain.

They saw the saguaro cacti as human relatives — ancestors — brought to Earth by God in the form of the saguaro cactus.

Each saguaro is said to have a lesson to teach us, acting as a mirror to help us look at ourselves with a new perspective, and remind us to respect ourselves and to stand strong and tall.

Driving deeper into the desert, I found a trail to walk in silent contemplation among the saguaro. As I encountered the saguaro on foot, I began noticing their unique personalities.

Some standing alone, some in pairs, and others in clusters of families. Each standing in silence and generosity, saying, you must meet us on our terms — quiet and open.

It wasn’t until the sun began to set and the saguaro’s darkened silhouettes came to life that I found myself in direct communion with a cactus holding a message for me.

I found this saguaro standing alone, its arms outstretched facing westward in an exalted praise of the setting sun.

Here, this saguaro told me to sit down, listen, and be humble.

I sat down and picked up a rock thinking, “I will take this rock home to remember this moment!” But the cactus gently told me, No, you will leave this rock here. I placed the rock back down on the dirt.

Instead, through its devotional silence, the saguaro guided me to access my own divine quiet within.

The wind began picking up as the sun lowered, and in the silence of the landscape, the only distinguishable sound was the whisper of the wind moving through the needles of the saguaro, which echoed the mantra,

Simple Land Of Extremes

“There are two easy ways to die in the desert: thirst or drowning. This place is stained with such ironies, a tension set between the need to find water and the need to get away from it.”
— Craig Childs

In preparation for this trip, I have been reading The Secret Knowledge of Water: Discovering the Essence of the American Desert by Craig Childs.

Childs holds an M.A. in Desert Studies and treks into the most remote regions of Southern Arizona’s deserts in search of one of its scarcest resources — desert water, relying on a balance of indigenous wisdom, intuition, and science in his quests.

In his writing, Childs is crazed by the hunt for desert water, which he calls “Unedited, perfect…a softly spoken word that the surrounding desert could not hear.”

He writes about one experience in particular, when he had not found water for days.

Deep within a canyon in Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge, he suddenly heard a cluster of voices speaking. But as he rounded the canyon wall, what he found instead was an unthinkable waterfall.

Not a person for miles, he had been hearing the voice of the desert water. Childs writes,

“The voices were part of a complex language, a language that formed audible words as water tumbled over rocks, and one that carved sentences and stories into the stone walls that it passed. I would grow older with this language, tracing its meanings like working back through genealogy.”

Reading this, I thought back to moments when I have heard water speak. Recalling the different voice of each source, I remembered a poem I wrote in Argentina when moved by a vast waterfall.

Falling Water 

We think we are so powerful
we builders of buildings and things

but have you ever watched water fall
how its greatness is completely expressed in essence 

needing nothing more to show its power
how a waterfall says 

Here I am
Here I am
Here I am

without ever saying anything at all

Humans Are Absent Because They Die

Walking through the surrounding trails near Saguaro National Park, I thought about this complex language that so many have been tracking before my time.

A language that meant life or death for the Hia-Ced O'odham people.

Listening to this desert language in his own way, Childs has learned “When to commit to walking straight across desolation to reach the right place,” which has kept him alive.

When in our lives are we delivered a similar type of signal?

Perhaps I love the desert so much because its harsh environment weeds out those who won’t heed to its demanding requirements.

Like the creosote bush that secretes a growth-inhibiting toxin into the ground, discouraging encroaching plants from taking its moisture, on a much larger level, the desert’s fierce conditions have kept humans from destroying its purity.

And in the desert’s purity, there is space — for those who dare — to listen to a divine and ancient voice that lives on today.

So Long Desert, For Now.

Driving out of the desert, the mountain and her many saguaro said goodbye and see you soon.

I write this edition one week later, back home in California.

My journey incomplete, ongoing, and filled with more questions and breadcrumbs to follow on later pursuits.

In Letters to a Young Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke writes about the tension of “gestation and birthing” in the creative process,

“Everything is gestation and then birthing. To let each impression and each embryo of a feeling come to completion in itself, in the dark, in the unsayable, the unconscious, beyond the reach of one's own understanding, and with deep humility and patience to wait for the hour when a new clarity is born: this alone is what it means to live as an artist: in understanding as in creating.”

The desert is quite certainly gestating within me.

I look down at a mark on my left thigh where a saguaro pricked me as I was leaving, waking me from a state of wonder.

I think half of the needle is still in my leg.

With love,

Alison ❤️🌵