Just before dawn, stand in the cool desert. Eastward, a dark butte protects you from the light that soon will strike. The oblong moon hovers, waning, in pale silver sky. Walk, and your foot crunches the gravelly earth, loud in the silence. But then it isn’t silent, is it? Before and behind you birds make music. Skinny lizard skitters ahead of you. Farther on, a soft young cottontail disappears into the rattlebush. Wend between the sticky green leaves and furry-globe pods of creosote. Meander...
What comes to mind when you...
It was a relief to get past Las Vegas en route to Death Valley. an open space we traversed reminded my friend Tessa and me of Colorado’s mountain-ringed San Luis Valley, where we once lived. But then we dipped southwest from Pahrump, Nevada, crossed a ridge and dropped into an alien world. Vegas was electrified urban surrealism. As we...
In February 1975, I joined the Spiritual Life Institute’s young Carmelite community in Sedona, Arizona. As a college student, I fell in love with the red-rock chaparral beauty near Oak Creek Canyon. I wanted to learn more about Catholic contemplative life, which I first encountered on my occasional retreats at the Institute’s Nada Hermitage....
Where do you place yourself? How does it taste? In our latest Fire and Light podcast, "A Taste of Place," Tessa Bielecki and I share a taste of the Sonoran Desert as we savor picking saguaro fruit with guidance from Tohono O’odham neighbors. We relish the physical act of picking fruit with a traditional tool and preparing it to eat. And we...
I love the word sierra, and not just because you get to roll the r in Spanish. It means a range of jagged mountains, or a sawblade. The serrated complexion of the desert cuts into me. It makes me cry out, if only silently. If I did cry out loud, it would sound like the Muslim call to prayer, a lament, a curse, or a mayday alert. That’s the...