I have been repeating the phrase so continuously during the past few days that I continue to repeat it in my dreams. La ilaha ila Allah. La ilaha ila Allah. There is no god but God. And with it a process has begun, the process of owning up to the false gods that have commandeered my compass, pointing the direction of my life away from my souls very own personal true north. In three days I have watched years of decisions play out like a bad B movie. Only to realize that I wrote the script, I played the lead character. Shame. Humility. Oh what is this life I have lived?
My dreams are filled with visions of surrender, of all the things that I have given up by choice or that have been taken from me by circumstance. But in my dreams I can still see. Each morning when I awake I must face reality. For the past few days nothing has changed. The wind still rages, the sand still blows, the sun still scorches the earth, and I am still blind.
Day five I awake. I can tell it is dawn because I can detect a faint light behind my closed eyelids. Something has shifted. What is it? In the haze of sleep I lick the dust off of my parched lips. I tense. I’m straining to hear. I’m straining to hear something that is no longer there.
The wind has stopped.
The howling from the past three days has stopped. No more relentless slapping tent and blowing sand. It is perfectly quiet.
I strain to hear the absence of sound. It is so silent the only sound I hear is the sound of my breath. The only wind is the air entering and exiting my chest cavity. To momentarily break the silence I imitate the missing sound of the gale with a long slow out-breath through my pursed chapped lips.
It is surprisingly cool inside the tent. I feel around for my fleece and nestle it into my thin dusty sleeping bag. After three days of intense burning and pain, I have grown accustomed to keeping my eyes closed. I lie in the tent for a long time, listening to the desert. So quiet. So still. Nothing moves. I snuggle in my sleeping bag, my ears resting in the silence. The experience of the wind was like being subjected to unrelentingly loud chaotic noise night and day without a break for even a moment. It has been physically and psychologically unnerving. Now, silence. The heat has been equally oppressive and unrelenting. This morning everything has cooled.
The growing rays of sunlight begin to warm the fabric of the tent. I decide to open my eyes, and then I change my mind. It feels so comfortable lying curled up, eyes closed, listening to the silence, not knowing what will happen when I open my eyes. Not knowing can be a comfortable place. I’m really not sure what I will do if I cannot see again today, so I postpone the moment of knowing. I enjoy relief from the wind and the sand, and the internal storm that has raged along with it.
I roll onto my stomach and feel around for my water bottle. It is empty. I feel around for the container to fill it. I grew up around blind children because my father was a teacher for the visually handicapped. I remember watching how they would fill a glass of water, one finger inside the top of the glass to feel when it is full. I fill my water bottle the same way, imagining my life as a blind person. I have been imagining that I could spend my life somewhere, blind, sitting in meditation, a monk. This fantasy has started to feel oddly appealing. I could spend my life in devoted meditation and not have to face anything else, let the world be what it is. This could be the answer to my calling. There is simplicity in it. There is a sense of completion. There is a sense of feeling relieved of the responsibility of the healing that needs to take place in the world. Someone else can carry those burdens, speak out, and protest. I am exhausted from the past few years of trying to do the right thing and getting pummeled by circumstance. I am exhausted from the past few days of sun and sand and wind. God just wants me to sit blind and meditate. Less than a week into the 40 days and I have a possible answer.
But then I get unnerved again. I thought that by the time I came to the desert I had given up everything I had to give! If God takes away my eyes what else do I have left to give? My hearing? My tongue? My hands? My life? What if I do not get to complete what I came here for? I had not imagined failure until this moment. My body musters as much anger as a ragdoll can muster. I refuse to be physically subdued, pinned to the desert floor, stripped of my sight and then sent home after less than a week. I pray with my face in my pillow.
Okay God…I offer a challenge
If you want my eyes, take my eyes
If you want my tongue take my tongue
If you want my hands, take my hands
If you want my life, take my life
I’m not leaving this desert because you cannot take this from me!
This is my promise to return to you and I am not leaving.
I guess I have given myself my answer. If I cannot see again today I am still not leaving. I will stay out the 40 days blind or not.
What is real vision anyway?
What I am asking to see has little to do with my eyes.
What I am asking to hear has little to do with my ears.
I need new eyes, new ears.
Thirsty from hours of sleep without fluids, I drink the entire bottle of water. I can feel the water flowing into me, and my body absorbing the cool liquid. First my lips, then my tongue and mouth, even my teeth feel dry and thirsty. I can feel the water make its way to my stomach. My body begins to wake up from the night and from the fog of dehydration, like a cut flower stem dipped in a vase of water.
My eyes itch and I go to rub them but stop when I feel the dust on my lids from the sand and sleep. I pour some water on my face, not caring that it spills on the floor of the tent. Everything is dusty so I have nothing clean to dry myself with. I just let the water evaporate from my face.
Dust removed, I cautiously crack open my eyelids. The dim morning light of the tent is painfully bright. I hold my hand to shade my face. I peek my eyes open again. The intensity of the pain has diminished. What has felt like shards of glass before only feels like stinging and itching. They itch so badly that I want to rub my eyes as hard as I can but I resist. I feel around for my eye drops in the pocket of the tent and rinse my eyes. This time the burning sensation has greatly lessened. I blink hard and squint at my hand in front of my face. I can see my hand, my broken fingernails filled with dirt. I can only hold my eyes open for a few seconds at a time - but I can see. I cup my hands over my eyes and they fill with tears. The saltwater form rivulets that flow through my fingers and down my arms and onto my legs, a flood of relief flowing over my body, carving river-ways on my dirt covered skin. The tears finally stop. The rivers become arroyos.
In some very strange way, I am actually disappointed. Odd things can become comfortable. Spending 40 days lying beside my tent with my eyes closed had started to become a safe place. The fantasy of a simplistic life as a blind monk felt strangely safe. But this was not meant to be the answer for this journey. Not today anyway. The search will have to continue.
I imagine, on the spiritual level, the temporary loss of my sight might be like having metaphorical cataract surgery. Is it possible that something has been removed? How accustom have I been to looking through the lens of emotional and psychological scar tissue that has grown over my eyes? Through what scars of experience do I unknowingly view the world? How has my vision been limited or altered? What will the world look like now? What will it look like in 40 days? How many layers are still waiting to be removed? At the moment I can only wonder, my body only beginning to recover.
I send the daily text “I am still alive.” Now that the fear of losing my sight has lessened its grip on me, I take inventory of the rest of my body. I realize how weak and depleted I am after the past days in the heat and wind. I wonder how close I came to a literal surrender of life? I barely touched my food. It looks like I was drinking water from the amount remaining. As I try to remember details I realize how little I remember from the state I have been in. All I can recall is a sense of being emotionally and physically bulldozed, the continual offering of the prayer, and scattered images of my life – parts of self needing to be relinquished – that would flit in and out of my consciousness, my very shaky and intermittent consciousness.
The tent is now getting uncomfortably warm and I want to feel the rest of the cool morning while I still can. I tie on a sarong and put on a hat to keep my eyes shaded. I crawl out of the tent and stand up for the first time in days. Immediate massive headrush. I fold over putting my head on my knees to keep from passing out. Standing up again, slowly this time, I still feel disoriented as if God has spun me around for three days. My body is stiff and sore from the fetal position I had been maintaining. Still a little dizzy I walk slowly, squinting my eyes open and shut, open and shut, until I reach a nearby pile of granite boulders. I lie down on a flat granite surface in the shade on the Northern side of the outcrop and rest my eyes, feeling the coolness of the rock on my back.
I peek out, a few seconds at a time. I watch as the morning sun in the East wakes up the Mojave, an artist’s hand caressing the desert around me with soft pastels. The haze in the air filters the rays, coloring the distant hills in lavender and periwinkle, and the valley below in soft yet illumined shades of coral and rose. The earth around my feet is like a flaxen yellow, subdued and glowing at the same time. I need a new word for yellow, new colors for the desert at dawn. They are colors penetrated with light. Everything glows as if illuminated externally and internally. These colors my eyes are witnessing do not exist in the language I speak.
I turn my head to the right and there is a little desert mallow flower next to my face, it is a lumened orange. I rest my eyes, then open and look at the flower. Then close them again. I open them and now there is a little white incandescent butterfly on the flower. I close them again. Open and the butterfly is gone. It is like I am watching a film with missing frames. I rest my eyes.
Cool granite. Eyes closed. I feel my body pulsing against the stillness of the stone, my heart beating. I can hear a soft breeze move through desert grass. Whatever dimension of blasting wind and sand and deaf and blind I experienced for the past three days I am now back in a peaceful, still desert with my vision and hearing returning. The desert sandstorm has passed. The internal storm that drove false gods from the depths of my ego onto the shores of my awareness has subsided. In my imagination I can see their skeletons bleaching in the sand, not resolved, but rather laid bare for me to contemplate. Looking at the scattered bones I feel fear and shame and gratitude, much like looking at vomit. I suspect this is only the beginning. The first veil of my own internal landscape pulled aside. Cataract number one removed. I sit in witness to my false gods.
I have a strange faint buzzing in my ears, like a distant Morse code, it pulls me from my Dali-like mental landscape. Maybe it is an internal echo of the wind? I listen to it. In spite of the buzzing I notice that the other sounds around me are unusually well defined. I can hear little birds flitting around the rocks and chirping. I hear their little feathers whisk the air. Not just hear, but almost feel their feathers whisk the air as if the air is an extension of my skin. What might be their conversations? Every bird sound appears so specific, so intentional. I notice that the little birds to not chirp over one another, one stops and then the next begins, taking turns like a conversation, a very fast and complicated conversation. I have trouble following which one is chirping. Back and forth and back and forth they go. My attention is absorbed by the twittering flock.
I lie on the granite outcrop, listening, until the heat from the sun starts disrupting the temporary cool of the morning. As I’m about to move a squirrel pops its head up to check me out. It is a dusty brown, the color of the desert with bright black eyes. It stares me down. I am reminded again that I am the stranger in the situation and this is its home. I had a pet squirrel in Thailand that would sit on my shoulder and hold on to my ear and talk to me in little clicks and squeaks. I try making some clicking sounds at the desert squirrel. It just stars back at me. Obviously I do not speak squirrel. Despite the dedicated efforts of the squirrel in Thailand, I never learned its language.
I get up and stretch my sore body. I decide to walk slowly around the boulders, stopping and starting as I open and close my eyes. Some boulders are one or two stories tall. On a smooth protected west face, high above the ground I spot petroglyphs, ancient symbols on the stone. I can make a guess at what they are, what they mean, but how would I possibly know? I begin to think about language, human and other. Someone placed these images here to be witnessed, to tell a story, to preserve something important. So much judgment is placed on whether a people have a “written” language, a “written” history. Oral traditions have existed for thousands of years and yet have not been taken seriously by Western colonial explorers and academics, as if written colonial histories are infallible and immutable. What has this done to make people with oral traditions obsolete? What knowledge have we lost? What wisdom? What medicine? What history? What stories? The Mojave is filled with petroglyphs and pictographs that we may never understand. I stare and wonder what ancient hands made these symbols. I can see but not understand. The squirrel has a language I can hear but not understand.
Around another boulder to the south I encounter a white sage plant. Even plants have a language I cannot understand. When deer or cattle are grazing on a sage plant, that plant will send a signal to other sage plants in the area. In response all of the sage will spontaneously emit a bad taste that encourages the grazing herd to move on. How is that not communication? In the book The Hidden Life of Trees, Peter Wohlleben describes a fungal network that passes information between trees, a Wood Wide Web of vast communication that humans have almost zero understanding of.
I continue the earth-wise circle. To the east the sun is advancing, slowly, but definitely, bringing on the heat of the day. Up above a bird of prey cries out. From high in the sky it rides the shifting currents of air. What are these cries? I lament that once upon a time humans and animals may have communicated very differently. In the sacred stories and spiritual practices of indigenous peoples, humans talk to animals and animals talk to humans. The Hebrew Bible is filled with cross species talk and interaction like the snake in Genesis and the burning bush of Moses. The Aborigines hear the stars sing. The Quran speaks of all creation glorifying God, each creature with its own form of prayer, and yet humankind does not understand. [Qur'an 24:41]. Have “modern,” “civilized,” humans lost a dimension of our hearing? Have we gone deaf to all but our own species? Am I tone deaf to creation? Am I tone deaf to God? Was does it take to get this hearing back?
I have my sight coming back and my hearing back and I am at once faced with their limitations.
My eyes, what they cannot see; my ears, what they cannot hear; or worse, what I cannot comprehend. The squirrel and the birds and the petroglyphs make me feel even more blind and deaf than I have been for the past three days.
I finish my circle around the granite outcrop. The squirrel has disappeared, probably far down below the desert floor, to its cool dark burrow. A city of tunnels and chambers exists under the desert floor, creatures who only come out at night to do their searching. I sit down on the boulder where I started and go back to being mesmerized by the little delicate mallow. It is now flowering in the direct heat of the sun, so vulnerable in this harsh desert. It flourishes so soft even though it takes roots in the hard dry earth. For a second time it captures my attention completely. It is my favorite color of yellow-orange, vibrant, attracting the attention of butterflies and bees. At home I have orange embroidered throw pillows from India, an orange rug and a painting of Cairo against an orange sunrise on my wall. Even my bedroom as a little girl had fuzzy yellow and orange flowers on the wallpaper. The five little petals begin to flutter. I just don’t know how it can keep doing what it is meant to do in this unrelenting environment. As I gently give it water from my bottle I start to cry.
