Desert Homemaking: A Meditation
On a night with a big full moon, the desert is a study in shades of black. There are the cliffs that rear up, iron monstrosities, so heavy and dark and vast that they are redolent of heat death and exploded stars; in the hollows between them, the air is striped with reflected moonlight and striated with half-visible cloud, its bluish haze the closest thing in the scene to color. The dirt spread out in front of you is a little brighter than ink, brighter and clearer still as you get closer, then suddenly eclipsed into vanishing by your clunky feet and your shadow. The moon is kind enough to trace gentle borders around a rock, a plant, a snake, allowing them to keep their definitions, allowing you to hold onto some sense of place and relation. And then it moves behind a cloud, and everything disappears into darkness, or blurs and shifts, and you stand there unseeing until it chooses to come back.
Some people — a very few — actually thrive on this: a no-holds-barred surrender to the caprices of the moon and the graces of Providence, groping their way around the cliffs and through the dark, never turning on the light, making do. The rest of us, less remarkable, live in towns.
We live in a small town in the desert on the lip of the Dead Sea. That is to say, we live on the thin border between an environment where everything struggles to survive and sometimes succeeds, and another one where everything struggles to survive and nothing does. Our days and nights are marked by silence; every so often, as in the highway ghost towns of the American West, a car drives past us on its winding way to somewhere else. We are alone in the wilderness, so alone that we stand out, that every house seems to exude from its flat roof the wet steam of human beings. We’re a few minutes’ drive away from the ruin that, as legend and archaeology would have it, used to be Sodom: the arid stretch of rock-strewn waste that Noah’s rainbow forgot. Lot’s wife, a voluptuous, sulfur-stinking column jutting out from one of the cliffs, peers down for all time at the devastation.
In our modest shelter, we are flat-out unlike the land around us. And while we have not reached the levels of sheer modernist hallucination found in, say, Phoenix — a weird dreamscape of plastic grass and dug lakes and geometric Jetsons-style architecture, not a whit in common with its wasteland surroundings except for the occasional cactus — we have our fences and our streetlights, our drip irrigation and our wheezing air conditioners for the blister-hot summer afternoons. We may live in a glorified shipping container peeling at the seams, our makeshift vegetable beds lined with gleaned stones, but in a place like this even a shipping container feels like a fist shaken at the dirt and thirst and darkness.
The desert is a place of prophecy, visions, dreams and quests. Moses receives the tablets on a mountain, one of those behemoths so black at night (although, the Midrash has it, among the smaller of the mountains). His feet are buried in the same dark sandy dirt as covers every other inch of the desert, his fingertips and eyes graze the limitless sky. And down below, made crazy by loneliness and fear, the lack of Moses and the seeming endlessness of their sandy trail, the people lose themselves in ecstasy to a calf — whom I have no doubt was in that moment utterly real for them, not a puppet of melted gold but a live and frightening power. Being neutral, practically empty of living things, the desert allows you to fill it up with your own imaginings and the things you hear — truth or mirage, divine revelation or blasphemy.
That’s one explanation for the spiritual wealth of such a place. Another is that this environment, hostile as it is, calls attention to the mere fact of your being alive — unlikely as it is, small as you are. You are alive and colorful in this mostly dead, mostly monochrome place, and it forces you to double back into yourself: to take refuge in yourself, the only voice for miles around. In the infinite, static void of the desert, you are finite and dynamic, petty and brilliant and profoundly interesting.
There is a way, too, to expand this theory from you to everything around you. Unlike the forest or the city, teeming with natural abundance, steeped in its own vitality, the desert seems indifferent to the continued existence of the things within it. There are no pendulous fruits swinging wantonly from wild trees; there are no bars or convenience stores or mole-holes or meadows or even water. Thus, with its tendency towards death, the desert manages to highlight every glimmer of life. The beetle scuttling from rock to rock, the ibex hopping across a ledge, the ten varieties of prickly shrubs with their thorns the length of a pinky finger: all these are defiant yelps of “yes” in a stark ecosystem of “no.” They should not be alive, and yet they are, and so each one of them is a kind of neon sign gesturing to the terror and wonder and mystery of life.
So I have stopped begrudging us our highway and our air conditioners. Like the sparse flora and fauna, like the sullen and precious pools of water that gather among the rocks in the winter, we are using every tool in our arsenal to survive. This is the way everything lives in the desert: flagrantly, desperately. We stand out like a sore thumb, as does the fox, as does the sagebrush. Our little blotch of light from homes and streetlamps, so yellow among the thousand shades of black, bright as the full moon — we are not against nature but part of it, our habitat a shipping container, the gift of living both our weapon and our aim.
