The Desert Inside

Life is busy at the moment for me. Things are moving and I am grateful for that. On the work side and also in the rest of my life lots of things are happening and after such a long time of struggling that is a great feeling. Yet the last two weeks have just been crazy and I am feeling quite run down. So finally there is an evening of me-time.

I am sitting on my bed not doing anything. Just sitting. Feelings pass by, thoughts follow. I watch them. Slowly they disappear in the sound of the sea. And that sound carries me to the desert. I never wrote about that time. That time in the desert.

It was around April and since my visa was expiring I drove up to Namibia so that coming back would get me an extension of three months. It was a journey shared with my mother. A time that cannot be compared to any other holiday I have ever been on.

Today as I close my tired eyes the desert opens up again - hours of driving, no radio, and miles and miles of nothing. How can nothing be so filled with everything? We do not talk much. The things that used to occupy my mind seem to have dissipated in the air. There is no smell. I realise I had expected lots of time for thinking. There is lots of time – but no thinking. I have seen landscapes that have overwhelmed me with there dramatic beauty. This is different. The desert does not hit me with an unexpected dramatic scenario. It touches me with an even more unexpected peacefulness and deep wisdom. Through this scentless air and the vast space that stretches out before me it infiltrates every corner of my being. I am aware of how small I am in this vast space and yet I sense how I am one with all of this.

There was one night that I remember even more deeply. We had somehow missed the campsite where we had planned to spend the night. I was sitting in the back of the bakkie watching the sun set through a cloud of red dust whiling up behind the car. It finally got dark and we decided it didn’t make sense to drive on and pitched the tent on the side of the road. We had no clue what was around us. All we could see was an enormous sea of stars. We sat and listened. Nothing. Not one single sound. There in the dark, listening to the silence all questions were answered.