A desert is not nothing

I’m going back to the desert in a few weeks’ time.

I camped overnight in the Sahara Desert a long time ago and I discovered that it is a place unlike any other that I have been to in the world. Ben Fogle, the intrepid travel journalist, said the same.  Both my past and upcoming trip to the desert take a journey from Marrakesh, over the beautiful Atlas Mountains down into the edge of the desert and picking up camels and a guide, head into this transformational space.

Life is an invitation to a journey. This is one of the most ancient ways of framing life known to humanity. The modern ideas around goals, tasks, arriving, performing, succeeding, destination, are all just that…modern and they often lack meaning, richness and mystery. Pilgrimage is one of those ancient practices and metaphors that have guided people across the millennia and one dimension of that journey, that pilgrimage, is the metaphor of the desert. Often when people talk about places of ‘nothing happening in their lives’, or ‘nothing going on’, or great grieving, they say, ‘it’s a real desert’. Desert is often synonymous with nothing, empty, powerless, aimless, unproductive.

I have realised that our map of life shapes what we see. In the midst of my own threshold towards eldering, I kept coming back to this painful feeling of a void - Nothing is working out; Has life left me on the shelf? Have all my fears about this phase of life been proved right? It was sitting with this experience that gave me an ‘ah ha’ moment. I realised that I was trying to make a different journey with an old, outdated map. The idea of the ‘void’ and the ‘nothing’ went with the old map I’d inherited.  A map that said I had to keep on doing visible things to justify my worth. It was in one of those ‘nothing’ moments that I heard myself say, ‘this feels like a desert’. In that same moment I remembered the literal desert experience I’d had and other metaphorical desert experiences in my life and thought I needed to challenge my feeling that nothing was going on. So, I decided to take a sheet of paper from a yellow legal pad, turned the page sideways from portrait to landscape and drew a line down the middle. At the top left I wrote ‘Inner’ and on the top right I wrote ‘Outer’.  The question I asked myself was whether it was true that ‘nothing’ had happened over the past few years of this threshold in my life. What had actually happened within me, inside myself and what had happened in my tangible outcomes? The result blew me away! I couldn’t believe it. Just reviewing the ‘Outer’ list I saw I had written down thirteen different projects I had created and delivered. And ‘creative’ was the key word. What had felt like an arid period of my life where ‘nothing is going on’ and Where I’d felt ‘left on life’s shelf’, had actually been immensely creative and productive.

The key thing is that a desert is not a void.

A desert is not nothing.

It’s a place of immense significance.

It is most definitely something.

The invitations that life offers us, to discover a deeper, more meaningful, more unexpected journey, most often come through the periods of our life in the desert.

If a desert isn’t nothing, then what is that something that the desert offers us?

 A desert is a liminal space.

 A liminal space is an ancient realisation that when we are navigating a major threshold in our lives we need to live in a space of betwixt and between, of ‘then’ and ‘not yet’, of ‘were’ and ‘becoming’. If, in our need to get control or certainty, we foreclose on this space too quickly, we short circuit the transformation we have been working so hard for. The space is essential to allow the old to be seen for what it is and to shed it, let it die and allow something new to emerge. It’s a process not an event. Deserts create such a space for these kinds of crossing over in our lives.

A place of simplicity.

When you go into the desert you leave most things behind. You have to simplify your life. You have to leave behind the phone (there’s no signal), the car, the house, the wardrobe, the job titles, the applause and the CV – all the safety nets and ego comforts. You can take a rucksack but not a suitcase. You are just left with yourself, maybe for the first time in your life. And that may feel a little terrifying.

In this place of simplicity you remove yourself from the prevailing systems of explanations, authority, power, success and accumulation, to try and get back to the essence of what it means to be human and what it means to be you. One of the reasons why the Desert Fathers and Mothers in the fourth century headed out into the desert was to regain a sense of simplicity in their lives, because their faith was now getting cluttered up with all kinds of new ideas of religion, politics, power and self-interest, since the Emperor Constantine had made their faith legal and controllable by the ‘system’. 

A place of silence

Our lives are full of so much noise and distractions. Phones, emails, endless chatter, noisy streets. We often use the phrase, ‘I couldn’t even hear myself think’. Well, in the desert you can. You can hear yourself think and you can confront the fact that as humans we have approximately 60,000 thoughts a day and 75% of them are repetitive, unproductive and rotate around our own ego’s preservation. Unless we learn to think new thoughts, we are compelled to repeat the old ones and continue to get the old outcomes. In the desert you can hear you own ego cycles of thoughts ‘Trevor is a great guy because he gets things done; he makes things happen’. And then you are able to ask yourself in the midst of this desert, ‘so how’s that working out for you right now Trevor?’. In the desert you can hear your fear thought-cycles, your anger thought-cycles, your life strategy thought-cycles. The silence gives us this great gift to see and make changes to our thoughts and thus our actions.

A place of solitude

In the desert you are largely on your own. You can look at your needs and your dependencies and recognise your co-dependencies. Sometimes we don’t know what we think, what we feel, what we want, what we believe. Being alone with yourself presents us with the opportunity for a priceless place of reflection. In some of the modern outward-bound leadership programmes, after a few days of intense experiences in challenging environments, each participant has to ‘go solo’. Just the individual and their journal, alone, in order to deeply process what they have learned about themselves and to access a deeper self in the deeper solitude within oneself.

A place of the spiritual

Most people go on retreats to regain some kind of perspective and the word spiritual in its widest sense is that place where we confront our own answer to the question ‘what gives my life meaning?’ We are all religious because religion literally means ‘what holds us together’. We all have a conscious or unconscious answer to that. Abraham Joshua Heschel saw that the pathway to searching for whether there is any deeper transcendent meaning to our life is to experience wonder. I defy anyone to lay out in the Sahara Desert at night, under the vast darkened night sky, watching the shooting stars carve a light across the universe and not be struck with wonder.

A place of cleansing

As we begin to make friends with our own thoughts and motivations in the desert, we are also free to assess what is life-giving and what is life-denying in our thoughts, feelings and behaviours and the impact they have on others. Ken Wilber calls it ‘cleaning up[1]’. We can see what needs to be cleaned up, changed, rearranged and apologised for, with others. The desert is a place of grace. Of unconditional acceptance. You are a witness of and witnessed by the landscape surrounding you. There is no competition. No judgement of yourself or others. The only judgemental voices are the ones within your own head and can be let go of. It just is. The harshness of the environment allows us to be more forging and create perspective on our own frail humanity. Such grace allows us to just be with ourselves and our environment. To clear away the clutter that does not serve us.

A place of seeing more clearly

Because the distractions are removed and the natural reinforcement of every day perspectives and ideas have been removed, the desert creates a mirror to see ourselves more clearly and a lens to see the world and our role in it more clearly.

A place of curiosity

All innovation and creativity and new thoughts don’t come from a place of knowing, but of not knowing. Knowing gives us what we already have, but not knowing creates questions, it invites searching, it engenders curiosity. In the desert, with every familiar thing removed we can begin to play with ‘what?’ and ‘what if?’ and ‘I wonder…’ and ‘is that view I hold really true? Is this my own view or have I inherited it’

A place of listening

In the desert there is often no sound and even when there is the sound of a growing wind, then it is a different quality of sound than we are used to. We tend to think that the world is naturally noisy and that silence occasionally interferes, when actually the base note of creation is silence and it is punctuated by noise. The ancients believed God dwells in the silence, not the noise. The silence comes first. It means we are invited to learn to just listen. Listen to our breath, our most familiar and most ignored friend. Listen to our own heartbeat, our other vital friend. Listen to our thoughts, our fears. We all have a unique life force that propels us into each day and the desert allows us to hear that energy and what shape it is wanting to take in our lives. It also allows us to hear our own true, undefended, non-ego-driven voice, because we don’t have the need to defend in the ways we often do in our normal busy lives and it allows us to sift out our own voice as opposed to the received wisdom we are fed from the 10000’s of voices that we’ve imbibed or been distracted by each day.

A place of metaphors

The reason we are talking about deserts in the context of exploring a tap on the shoulder[2] is that both deserts and taps provide us with rich metaphors.  A metaphor allows us to navigate the unknown and inexpressible truths of our lives with ideas and images giving us something firm that our imagination and intuition can lean on. In the teachings of Jesus, the desert was a metaphor for a place of testing, a metaphor for the impossible (turn these stones, which in the desert look like flat bread, into actual bread) and the metaphor of scorpions and eggs (a curled-up scorpion in the desert looks like a small ornamental egg) to illuminate the deep love of a father to their child.

A place of peace

People go to the desert to find inner peace. The peace of the desert environment acts as an echo and an invitation to discover an inner peace.

A desert is definitely not nothing.

So how do I find my way through the desert?

In a few weeks’ time I am going back to the Sahara Desert for a short retreat…with a guide. Someone whose whole life has a deep experience of the terrain. Our intermediary, who fixed up the trip, said to me one day, “You can’t go into those dunes alone. You will get disoriented and lost. People die there when they don’t have a guide”.  The guides are the elders, they have been there before, they are experienced in the terrain, they can spot the looming storms and know where the oases are hidden.  We need elders as our guides, to discover the ‘something’ of our truer lives, that is often disguised in life as ‘nothing’ and to help us develop as elders.

The desert is not nothing.

This article is an adaption from my book A Tap On The Shoulder, to be published in Spring 2025

[1] Ken Wilber The Religion of Tomorrow      Shambala 2017

[2] A Tap On The Shoulder will be published in Spring 2025