Armistice Day 2010

Maybe there was a little hole in my trust. I was instantly captivated when my friend, Sabine, told me early this year about the Qi Gung seminar she had recently led in the Moroccan Sahara. It was precisely where I had travellled 45 years ago. I vividly remembered my first taste of the desert. I was a young man hitch-hiking across Europe, going where the rides took me. When I reached Gibraltar, taking the ferry across the narrow strait to Tangiers and north Africa, if a little scary, was irresistible. Casablanca, Marrakesh, Fez, the Atlas mountains – and THE SAHARA! It was 1965 and my world was opening. I said yes to the adventure, and fortune blessed me. I made it to all those places and traveled all the way down the fabled Vallée du Draa and into the desert.

“Let’s take a group there together,” Sabine suggested, and even as the words came out of her mouth I knew it would happen. Another wheel was about to come full circle. This time we would be an Art of Being caravan trekking on camels into the Sahara, with Sabine leading a Qi Gung class as our daily early-morning meditation while I brought us all together each day to support our opening to the vast mystery around and within us.

And so it was! For 5 days our Berber team guided us on our camels into the Sahara. At the end of each morning and afternoon they set up camp and cooked our meals - desert-style and surprisingly good. From the start it was clear to me that the real group-leader would be not me, but the Sahara. Yes, while the Berbers cooked, for an hour or two we would gather in a circle on a carpet they laid out for us on the desert sand; and then I would let go and let be. I didn’t have to formulate and structure anything beyond this. In fact, I WAS NOT TO! I was to allow this to be THE DESERT EXPERIENCE. The vision excited me; in this too I was falling back through the decades. I could be with the circle of participants the way I was for the first 12 years that I led workshops; just sitting there with everyone and letting things happen naturally. My only responsibility, to keep the space open and free of distractions – this time so that the desert could come into us and we could lose ourselves into it. Like Van Morrison sings in one of my favourite songs: “Just you and me in nature, in the garden, and the father…”. The desert our garden, its spirit our father.

I loved the idea. Or did I? Had I come to doubt its simplicity? Did I carry a little fear that instead of bringing us deeper than ever into being, the vast Saharan expanse might wear us away until we were as inconsequential as dust in the desert wind? WAS THERE A HOLE IN MY TRUST?

How could I have doubted anyway, leader though I was, that the desert would also work on my being? Even before I left Europe for Africa, existence began to grind me down with a snarling brute of a cold. By the time my plane flew into Casablanca all I wanted to do was lie down and sleep for a couple of days. As it was, I had to wait 8 hours for my connecting flight down to the town of Ouarzazate on the northern rim of the Sahara where the twenty-first century disappears into times gone by. The plane’s departure was delayed, and it was 2 in the morning when I reached the hotel where we were all to meet up with each other. I was dead on my feet. Next day it was all I could do to show up. I looked and felt like a ghost. We headed south in 3 jeeps for half a day to a lovely oasis hotel and before dinner we convened: brief hello’s, practical matters, and the most rudimentary introduction I’ve given in years. Whether I wanted it or not, I was as minimal as in my guiding vision. It was all I could do to speak at all, or even to look at the people who had come to be on this adventure. Next morning, harassed by a minor sand-storm, we hiked into the desert for an hour to meet our Berbers and to climb aboard the camels that would become personal to each of us for the next 5 days. The Desert Experience had begun.

I felt ill. Nevertheless, riding a camel in the Sahara took me almost immediately into a space where it didn’t matter what was going on in my body. The desert had me! For the first 2 days in our Art of Being gatherings I said almost nothing. I didn’t even call the participants to the circle. I wasn’t going to do any more than really necessary, so if people took their time showing up, so be it. They did – both take their time, and eventually show up – and so casually that it was almost unrecognizable as an Art of Being circle. The demands of being present in my depleted body, my nose running, throat clogged with mucus, eyes red and watering, all left me with little inclination to guide or influence what was happening. My mind said, “This is wrong. You should at least tell everyone to join the circle”. But deep inside my physical misery I was glad and wonderfully amused. The desert had made its position clear and demolished any plans my doubts might contrive to take control and run its own programme. Whatever happened among us would come not because I was leading the group but because the desert had us. Yes, we are here to discover THE ART OF BEING IN THE DESERT.

After those first two days, as my energy returned and I came alive again, it was with the happy trust that the desert was indeed giving each of us whatever we needed. I felt more and more engaged with everyone, and at the same time – and I could see that it was so for everyone else too - deeply alone. During the second day’s trekking I remembered The Canterbury Tales. In the fourteenth century Geoffrey Chaucer wrote his long narrative poem made up of stories told by various characters as they traveled together through England on a religious pilgrimage. That evening I shared this with the circle and suggested that we could do something similar, each free to tell the circle a deeply personal story. People liked the idea, and having proposed it, I opted to begin. Don’t ask me what the stories were that were told in those circles. They were extraordinary treasures, given and received in the desert with the promise that there they would remain. What we took home was what they touched, moved, healed and transformed in us.

When the sun went down, clear silent cold descended as though the desert belonged now to outer space. Despite my cold, I wanted from the first to belong to it. I made my bed each night in the sand dunes and slept not under the stars, but among them. In the desert night, eternity is all. With the break of day, time returns and with it the life of nature and being, here, now, with the sun rising and the dunes glowing gold.

I’m writing this on a train, traveling from Boston to New York just 6 days after we came out of the Sahara. It’s Veteran’s Day – in England, Armistice Day – when the Western world remembers those whose lives were cut off in their prime on the fields of warfare. Outside, the same sun that heats the desert illuminates the chill autumn leaves. If you gaze upwards, even in this unquiet hub of human civilization the same blue sky whispers of eternity. In the desert, life and death both feel closer, and both are held safe in the arms of eternity. Death can be so unkind. It is good then to remember eternity. Sometimes it is the only consolation, and always, for ever, it is the blessing.