A Desert Pilgrimage:  Walking Toward Our Wildish Selves 

“As a child, one has that magical capacity to move among the many eras of the earth; to see the land as an animal does; to experience the sky from the perspective of a flower or a bee; to feel the earth quiver and breathe beneath us; to know a hundred different smells of mud and listen unselfconsciously to the soughing of the trees.”

– Valerie Anderson, A Passion for This Earth

My wildish self came to full bloom when I was eight years old. Just old enough (in those days) to be outside without supervision.At the end of our suburban neighborhood sprawled a field overgrown with live oaks, berry bushes, and wild grasses. It was, for my friends and I, the garden of Eden before the Fall. Crawling on hands and knees, we clawed out a fort deep inside the blackberry bushes. In that dark, moist womb we became rabbits, quail, mice. Whatever we did wasn’t important; it’s how I felt that remains. Wild. Free. We shook off the yoke of school at the end of the day and returned to our wildish selves. 

The wooden survey stakes arrived, uninvited, one afternoon. We didn’t know much, but we did know those stakes meant order was arriving to abolish the disorder we adored. We pulled up the stakes. They reappeared the next day. We pulled them up again and again for a week or more. Trespassers. Revolutionaries. Anarchists we were. We were living dangerously, and we knew it. 

Then my family moved. Unceremoniously pulled up our own stakes and left, never to return. I reluctantly abandoned my wild teachers, the plants and animals. Over time, I accustomed myself to the structure and security of worksheets and times tables drills, correct answers, and scores written in red at the top. As Talia Kolluri wrote, “My human body is an animal body that has fled from the wild.” I became fully trained and tamed, a good student, good worker, good wife and mother. Entirely civilized. 

As a mother and teacher, my brief escapes into the wild were a respite, a balm. I didn’t realize then that it could be more than a comfort, that it had more to teach me. Now, as I enter my retirement years, I am stunned to find that I’ve returned to my wildish self.   

On a day I should, by all rights, be working, I slip through the fence, trespass ever so briefly on someone else’s property, and enter, again, the wild. This time in the high desert of central Oregon, wild with juniper trees, sage brush, and bunch grasses. In the words of Kameelah Janan Rasheed, “Having abandoned the flimsy fantasy of certainty, I decided to wander.” 

Whatever I do as I wander, stroll, and explore doesn’t matter. What matters is how I feel. Wild. Free. Like a revolutionary and an anarchist. I’ve slipped the snare and gone feral, an eight-year-old in an old body, full circle. A return, as if by magic, to a beginner’s mind, a child’s mind. A shedding, as I walk, of my conditioning, my taming, my training. I’m living dangerously again, beyond the reach of culture’s expectations.   I’m slowly learning what the wild has to teach me now.   

Until I had the luxury of sitting in silence, I didn’t know there was a desert within me. Meditation is a slow sinking. Silence. Solitude. Darkness. The elevator within begins its gradual descent, passing thoughts and emotions, my mind unspooling. And then a gentle halt and the door opens to reveal a wide and spacious expanse. Sand and emptiness. My soul, a wind-swept desert, a plain of possibility.  

 Desert spaces mirror that unadorned place deep within me. Forests with their babbling brooks won’t do; they’re beautiful but just too busy. In order to feel congruent, I need what’s outside to match my insides. The desert allows the landscape of my heart, the need for emptiness, quiet, peace, to be mirrored in the landscape of my surroundings.  

All three Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Islam, and Christianity) were conceived in the desert. Why is it that desert spaces seem like a “thin place” where the divine feels closer? According to a traditional proverb of the nomadic Berbers, “The desert is the Garden of Allah, from which the Lord of the faithful removed all superfluous human and animal life, so that there might be one place where He can walk in peace.” The desert is the one place where we, and God, can walk in peace. 

Time spent in the desert has, throughout history, been a time of spiritual purification and preparation. The Israelites spent forty years in the desert after their escape from Egyptian slavery, preparing to enter the Promised Land. Jesus spent forty days in the desert after his baptism to prepare for his ministry. The annual Islamic pilgrimage to Mecca offers Muslims the chance to wipe clean the slate of their lives to start anew. Time spent in arid places, exposed to sky and sun and stars, strips away all of us that is not us and points us towards the next step, our Promised Land. 

In the 4th and 5th centuries, many Christians left the bustle of the Roman empire to live in and learn from the deserts of Egypt, Syria, and Palestine. The solitude and silence there, as in deserts all over the world, have much to teach. We, like those Desert Mothers and Fathers, have so much to learn from the desert: who we are, what matters, and what doesn’t.   

So essential are deserts to the soul that the Japanese, who live on an island with no deserts, felt compelled to build their own. Zen gardens, composed mostly of rock, sand, and very few plants, are man-made deserts. They have been used for centuries as an aid to contemplation.  

Deserts act as liminal spaces, between what was and what will be. There is no place quite like a desert to allow what needs to die within us to die and then to birth us into new ways of being. They are the wide-open expanses that must be crossed to get somewhere new. There is no detour. The outer journey on our feet propels the inner journey to the center of our souls. It can happen in an hour, a day, a week, or longer.  Each has value for the soul.   

In order to arrive at the sacred, for us to be awakened from the sleepwalk that is daily life, a pilgrimage happens slowly, at the pace of a saunter. The word saunter originates from pilgrims in the Middle Ages going a la Sainte-Terre, to the Holy Land. Children would see them coming and exclaim, “There goes a Sainte-Terrer!” a saunterer, a Holy Lander.  

All land is holy land and a Holy Lander is a good term for anyone who saunters, expecting to be astonished. A pilgrimage is a holy hike, seeking the glory of God which lies hidden, in the rocks and clouds, the sap flowing within each plant, the blood in the veins. A pilgrimage is a walk from routine to inner revolution.   

The silence and the solitude of the desert can, paradoxically, take us from separation to connection. As Thomas Merton, Catholic author and contemplative said, “We do not go into the desert to escape people but to learn how to find them; we do not leave them in order to have nothing more to do with them, but to find out the way to do them the most good.” Solitude returns us to our true selves, guiding us to confront the train wreck that lies below the surface of all our lives. As we walk, the wreck is put back on the tracks, in a different order perhaps, with some boxcars left behind. We become– slowly– whole. And it’s our whole, integrated selves that our family, friends, and neighbors need.  

A pilgrimage is a way to breathe the essence of the desert into our lungs, get it into our bones. We allow it to sink ever deeper into our bodies and souls.  We build a desert within us, a Zen garden, a monastery of the heart. It becomes an inner refuge to which we can return anywhere we are, whenever we want.   

Why deserts? Limited rainfall (usually less than 12 inches per year) doesn’t allow for any excess, making them models of restraint and asceticism. They possess a profound poverty, the type of poverty valued and vowed by many world religions. Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. The pattern seems to be that material poverty often hides spiritual wealth. 

A desert is a monastery: silent, reverent, orderly. The natural equivalent of a single bed with a small desk, a lamp, and cross on the wall. A wise priest once told me, “There is nothing I can say that is more important than what you can learn in silence.”  The plants and animals become our fellow monks, silently nodding to each other as we pass, willing companions and active guides.  

The juniper (Juniperus occidentalis) is ubiquitous in the high desert of central Oregon. Tougher than just about any other plant, it withstands severe drought, intense heat, and long periods of below-zero temperatures.  Its secret is its slow growth: a five-foot tree might be fifty years old.  The first decade is devoted to growing a long, strong tap root. Its energy dives downward, invisible but life-giving. Nothing showy or attention-seeking, just the plodding progress of each millimeter of root. Junipers sometimes take hold in a crack in a boulder, the root prying it apart at a glacial pace. Its motto seems to be: Wait. Whatever you need will eventually come. 

Junipers seem to take seriously the words of Pierre Telhard de Chardin: “Above all, trust in the slow work of God.” There is no sense of urgency, just trusting and allowing growth to happen in its own time. For people and for plants, this results in a certain solidity that can only be achieved slowly, over time. At the pace of a saunter. 

The juniper has a unique ability to self-prune. When times are hard, the plant will shut off resources to some branches which allows the rest to survive. Self-pruned branches are often at the very top or very bottom of the plant, new growth that the plant can’t afford or old growth that is no longer necessary. There is wisdom in self-pruning. Of knowing that resources are limited. That we can’t do it all.  What activities do I continue spending my finite resources doing that are no longer beneficial? What undertakings have I begun that I just don’t have the energy to support?   

Junipers are wildly various in appearance and shape. Some are single trunked like a proper tree; others have multiple trunks like a shrub. Columnar, conical, or round, with densely or widely spaced branches, they are masters of differentiation, riffing like jazz musicians, endless variation on just twelve notes. Their glory is their difference; their creativity shines. There are more than a million ways to be a juniper– or a human– on the land. 

The massive root structure, which is the key to survival in arid environments, includes both tap and lateral roots. The tap root goes straight down 25 feet in search of groundwater. The lateral roots spread out 100 feet from the trunk, ready to absorb what little snowmelt and rainfall may come. Junipers are in close relationship with adjoining plants, communicating through signals sent by mycorrhizal fungal networks in the roots. Distress signals travel from tree to tree. Older plants share water, sugar, and nutrients with their neighbors. The roots form a subterranean community of mutual aid and support. 

Junipers are so dependent on this network that if one dies, the rest are at risk. Sandra Cisneros wrote, “Let one forget his reason for being, they’d all droop like tulips in a glass, each with their arms around the other. Keep, keep, keep, trees say when I sleep. They teach.”  We too, can connect with our neighbors (human and otherwise) in subterranean, subconscious ways, a felt sense beyond words and ideas.This invisible network sustains us in ways we have yet to understand.   

All around us juniper pray, a choir of gray-green angels, monastics in a divine liturgy. They breathe in and grow up, catching the light. They breathe out and grow down, inching deeper, anchoring, feeling for the water of life. Their roots, woven together beneath our feet, carry mingled prayer traveling silently among them, a vibration in stillness. A simple prayer, a single word chanted down through the ages – Amen, so be it. Feel the hum of it; inhale the sum of it. Their work is their prayer, sunup to sundown. Rooted, their practice is acceptance of light and darkness, wind, and rain.  Sitting beneath the junipers, I join my prayer to the ones humming around and through me: Whatever comes, comes.  What will be, will be.  

Like modern-day Buddhas, enlightenment (who we are, what matters, and what doesn’t) comes to you and to me resting at the foot of a tree. Ancient masters, they teach.  We listen with the intensity of disciples, absorbing, as if through roots, wisdom and strength to continue the journey. We walk toward our wildish selves in the desert, that space of connection, to learn the wholeness and fullness of it all.  

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Tawnya Layne lives in the high desert of central Oregon. She spends most of
her time outdoors, hiking, boating, and horseback riding. Her essays and
poems have appeared in Braided Way Magazine and Red Letter Christians.
Visit her at tawnyalayne.com.