What The Desert Teaches

Silence, Space, Simplicity

In a couple of weeks I’ll be headed back to Hill House, a home I rent in the Mohave desert during the winter. I started going to escape the Chicago cold, but I keep going back for what the desert teaches.

The first lesson it teaches me is how much I need silence.

My first morning at Hill House, I woke early, started a fire in the pellet stove, made a cup of coffee, and then went outside to watch the sunrise over Copper Mountain.

The silence was stunning. It was so quiet that when a mourning dove landed on the roof above me, I could hear the breath the dove inhaled before it cooed on the exhale.

Sitting in Zen meditation for seven years did not accomplish what stepping into that silence did in five minutes. It felt as if all my life a monkey had been banging cheap cymbals in my ear, and then suddenly, someone shot the monkey.

In children’s games, if you make it to home base, the person who is “it” can’t touch you. Silence is our home base, the place at which our own minds, exploding with the shrapnel of life, can’t touch us.

It is as fundamental, as necessary as water.

The second lesson it teaches me is how empty space can open places inside us.

Hill House is in Southern California, just outside Joshua Tree National Park. It is a hundred miles east on 10 out of LA, another 40 to the town of Joshua Tree (population 6,640), four miles out into the desert, two miles up a dirt road, and a couple of hundred yards down a private drive.

It’s out there. The front porch looks out on nothing but desert. I can see one house.

I didn’t comprehend the size of the space outside until one morning a black storm cloud blew in, and I realized I could see the cloud whole, from its head in the west to its tail in the east.

One day as my car crested a ridge and I entered the Mohave National Preserve, so much empty space opened up so quickly, my stomach flipped. The car felt like it was going to lift off the highway and spin into outer space.

In the city, the thousand things—buildings, roads, cars, streetlights, people, trees, houses, lawns, dogs—harass me. My mind is crowded with it all. In the desert, I have room inside.

It is as if my interiority needs a reflection of itself in nature to realize its own extent.

Emptiness is a mirror; it introduces me to myself.

The third lesson the desert teaches me is the power of simplifying.

When the mathematician would solve a difficult problem, Thoreau wrote, he first frees the equation of all encumbrances, and reduces it to its simplest terms. So simplify the problem of life, distinguish the necessary and the real. Probe the earth to see where your main roots run.

I am a junk man. So many pots, pans, and pails hang from my cart that I can hardly keep it going straight on the sidewalk. In all the hurry to coffee, the hustle of work, chores, and calls, and the worry over house, bills, and future, it’s easy to lose my focus.

The desert says, “Here, let me make it simple for you.”

Everywhere you look things are living on nothing but a little water, earth, and sun. The wind scrapes a rock, makes a little soil, and deposits it in a crack. A seed lands, and a juniper grows.

How little is needed to sustain life in the desert—and not just to sustain it, but to make it flourish.

In my own house, surrounded by my possessions, I can pretend I am substantial. Hill House is not mine. Every year I return, I take fewer things, and every year, I feel closer to the world.

I’m looking forward to being there. I need the quiet. I like the way it seeps into my bones. I want to see more of those distant places in myself.

Most of all I’m looking forward to the simple life I live there: draw in the morning, hike in the afternoon, read in the evening.

If I’m lucky I’ll wake in the middle of the night, as I sometimes do there, to the howling, yipping, and screaming of the coyotes.

I’ll touch something real.

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