After my eldest daughter hiked the Sonoran desert, she phoned and said, “Mom, everything in the desert wants to kill you…even the plants!”
Since she was raised near the blue waters of a Great Lake and a deep green, northern forest, it certainly must have seemed so to her. Her observation made sense to me.
Once, I was a child of the prairie. It was a fairly benevolent place where vistas of jade colored cornfields stretched for miles. My greatest danger dealt with a possible fall down the barn's hayloft hole or lodging thistle hairs in my hand while pulling weeds in the soybean field. With a little forethought, both of these were preventable dangers.
During the past few years, the physical geography of a desert experience seemed to closely match an inner desert experience occurring in my own life. Everywhere I navigated, there seemed to be jumping Chollas that latched onto me with the same veracity as the living species itself. Just like the deceptive teddy bear cacti’s microscopic spines, these life events—once embedded—seemed near impossible to dislodge.
Recently, however, my hike through the Sonoran was a completely different experience. Late winter moisture had watered the desert. Though I had hiked the region before, this time verdant green undergrowth covered the formerly dry, brown landscape. Miniscule, comb burr plants with flowers only 2 – 3 millimeters in dimension carpeted the desert floor in green.
To my color-starved, northern eyes this was a feast! Mexican poppies shouted, “YELLOW!” from a rocky outcrop. Ocotillo sticks waved their emerald arms daring one to notice they were no longer shriveled or appearing like the living dead. The chubby, barrel cacti looked plump and full of life. Moving along the path with my hiking companions, I suddenly was aware of something bubbling up inside me. I stopped for a moment, focusing on what was filling my head and flowing toward my heart. Darned if it wasn’t joy! A full, cup-running-over feeling of unadulterated joy watering my inner desert.
I began to laugh, and then…I began to run. I raced down a wash and up the next hillside. Holding my walking stick horizontally like a balancing pole, I hopscotched across some chunky crushed rock in a dry creek bed. Soon, I was Forrest Gump-ing it through the most beautiful Sonoran desert of my life, and it felt great!
Around the next bend, I averted my steps away from the ever-grasping Chollas. "Ha," I thought,"You'll have to look for a new victim to vex!"
There is much in this world that may lead individuals into their own, personal desert experience. Each of us seems to have a tailor-made drought or two that threatens to squeeze the very life out of our souls.
Many of the great religions of the world use this time of year to mark and remind us that desert experiences happen to all: Jews await Passover, Christians perdure through Lent, and every human being in our northern hemisphere awaits the return of more light at the Spring Vernal equinox.
How we come out of our desert seems to be not so much learning as much as it is unlearning our attitudes toward it. It is letting go of shoulds, musts, and ought-tos and refusing to judge others, or ourselves...especially ourselves...harshly. And, mostly, it is learning to look and see the possibility of beauty wherever or however it may show itself.
Of this I am certain: the rain will come; the spring will arrive. The desert will bloom again. Even if all around appears desiccated and void of life, it...joy...will come.
Peacebeinall, Jane
