Desert Spaces
by Jane St. Clair

John Masefield wrote, “I must go down to the seas again to the lonely seas and the sky,” but you could say that about longing to go down to the desert again, to the lonely desert and sky. Something in me longs for desert spaces.

I understand that you might picture the desert as a place where things are lacking –a place where there is not enough rain, not enough greenery, not enough animals that look like us. I think the desert is enough just the way it is. I mean that it has enough rain, it has just the right number of plants, and the few animals who live there are happy. The desert is beautiful, perfect and enough just the way it is.

What I like most about the desert are its big blank spaces. You need these spaces to make a desert what it is. In that way the desert is like music. In music the space between the notes is just as important as the notes themselves.

Antoine Saint Exupery, an aviator as well as an author, loved the desert by chance. When his plane crashed in the Sahara, he had an unplanned desert encounter that he later used as the basis of his most famous book, “The Little Prince.”

He decided the quality makes the desert so beautiful is mystical and invisible, like love. He wrote, “The stars, the desert — what gives them their beauty is something that is invisible! …. One sees clearly only with the heart.  Anything essential is invisible to the eyes.”

“I love the desert,” Antoine Saint Exupery wrote. “You see nothing. You hear nothing. And yet something shines, something sings in that silence…”’ I think he was again talking about the something that is invisible to the eyes. I don’t think he found the peace of the desert to be lonely, because he wrote this in “The Little Prince:”

–“Where are the people?” The little prince asked. “It’s a little lonely in the desert.”

–“It’s also lonely with people,” said the snake.

In Algeria, the desert is considered the Garden of Allah. You might think, how strange! A desert is the opposite of a garden. Yet the saying in Algeria is this —The desert is the Garden of Allah where the Lord of the faithful took away all superfluous human and animal life so that there might be one place where He can walk in peace.

Peace to you as well.

It really does rain on the Arizona desert. To see how that looks, go to The Desert Smells Like Rain.