desertknowledge

“The invisible is only what is too brightly lit.” -Gerald Murnane The Plains

Is this the lesson- the infinite vastness dissolves pride & ego (the rush of “importance”) but not the need to be what we must, what is in our nature?

“The desert dweller is not indolent. He is simply attentive…to signs that escape us. The flat landscapes of the plain, punctuated by the tall palm tree shooting up to the sky, opens the mind to a perception of time infinitely vaster than ours. - Edmund Jabes

“In the desert one becomes the other: one becomes the one who knows the weight of the sky and the thirst of the earth; the one who has learned to take account his own solitude. Far from excluding us, the desert envelops us. We become the immensity of sand” - Edmund Jabes

2/ The language of silence. The summoning forth of silence. Allowing the unspoken, perhaps unspeakable things to percolate, to share space. The desert invites that within us.

1/“In the forests or besides rivers, everything speaks to humans. The desert does not speak. I could not comprehend its tongue: its silence…” - Neruda

What a frightening and profound exercise - to see the people we might have been! What do you do with that knowledge?

“Somewhere out among the swaying grasses of their estates, or in the least-visited rooms of their rambling homesteads, [the plainsmen] had learned the true stories of their lives and known the men they might have been”. Gerald Murnane, The Plains

2/Where can we remove the superfluities and have a garden—an abundance—of peace? How can we make our hearts that garden?

1/“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.” - Algerian saying

2/Why? What is it in us that is disarmed? #Questions #Wisdom #Search #REFLECTION

1/“We’re disarmed by how the [wilderness] ignores us—put off by the fierceness of its splendor, the totality of its silence, the horror of its solitude.” - Belden Lane

2/…You can live with it, live in it, live off of it, but you got to do it the desert’s way & you’ve got to know the rules. But never take it lightly” - Louis L’Amour. #wisdom #desert #reflections #Spirituality

1/“Look yonder! That’s desert! Real ol’ desert! But let me tell you somethin’. It’s been called ‘hell with the fires out’ & that’s a fair description, but there’s life out there boy! Life! You can live with the desert if you learn it …

2/allowing his mind, which refuses to expand upon the desiccated objects around him, to shrink within himself, & to anticipate in imaginative hope, more genial and enlivening scenes.” - Robert Laing

1/“The eye of the traveller roams in vain over the wide, unvaried superficies, in search of some object to rest upon, till at length wearied by repetition of the bleak and tedious sameness, he is willing to pull one of the folds of his turban over his eyes …

Nadine Gordimer wrote: “A desert is a place without expectation.” We don’t expect growth and bounty but also does not expect inevitable decline and true scarcity. It accepts. #desert #wisdom

“The desert is a natural extension of the inner silence of the body.” - Jean Baudrillard

“I have always loved the desert. One sits down on a desert sand dune, sees nothing, hears nothing. Yet through the silence something throbs, and gleams...” Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

“I had to live in the desert before I could understand the full value of grass in a green ditch.” Ella Maillart