Every year, I do a four-day retreat in the Utah desert during the period immediately following Thanksgiving Day. It feels right for me to be alone in the cleansing simplicity of the desert during Black Friday, with its surplus of frenetic consumerism and stress.
As all of us are acutely aware, daily life can be filled with a whole host of busy activities, projects and stresses, all of which have a tendency to drain us of the inspiration that is our spiritual food. Finding our center in the midst of such turbulence can be quite challenging. It is for this reason that I find it absolutely necessary to set aside special times to enter the inner desert of my being, where all is silent, simple, and devoid of the water of the usual consolations. The external desert helps me do just that. This silent land of candy-striped red-and-white rock, sand and sky enables me to become still enough so the light of creative insight can appear as though out of nowhere, allowing my heart to glow with subtle joy in the midst of a chaotic and stressful world.
Sitting by the campfire for five hours each night gives me the space to meditate, reflect, read and journal with a restful attitude that isn't often present during the course of my ordinary life in town. Here, in the desert, the Great Mystery can more readily speak to me within the creative capacity of my own thoughts, employing the still, small voice of which the biblical prophets so often spoke. It is this voice that can barely be heard within the uproar of life in the city, but which magically reappears within the desert whenever we are truly still.
Photo: Alpenglow, Needles District, Canyonlands National Park, UT; November 23, 2012
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