Except for the camels sipping water, and the lizards scurrying in the sand, there was absolute silence. Night had fallen, and there was a silence I had never felt before, one that brings a life-changing reckoning. Now Time and Space didn’t matter. It was only important to seize each precious moment under the vast, starlit sky, and to feel the “intensity” of true freedom. That enveloping sense of calm, the sense of abandoning all past fictions comes with a rebirth. As novelist Paul Bowles wrote in The Sheltering Sky, “No one who stays in the Sahara…is quite the same as when he came.”
I certainly changed. So did my daughter Lourdes–and maybe even the camels we rode. We spent five days in the southern Sahara a few weeks ago, meeting resilient nomadic Berbers, discovering the surprising textures of the demanding terrain, and above all, came to term with an existential truth. Loneliness. Being specks in Nature, mere fragments swept along by sudden, blinding wind storms, and cast into an eerie isolation that questioned our significance. In the desert, there’s such a meditative onslaught of nothingness and blurred reflections, the visitor must ask, “Who Am I.”
Yet long walks to nowhere, and meeting the challenges faced by those desert-tested Berbers, answered that penetrative question about Being. Now it’s easy for me to say, ‘I looked deep inside myself…I am ready for another adventure.’
