I wrote the below in a journal a couple years or so ago. Whenever I fill a journal, I like to reread and revisit the thoughts I had through the time it took to fill those pages. Sometimes, like now, I’ll also revisit journals years down the road.
The desert has touched me since well before I lived in it and officially became a desert rat, but I rarely feel up to articulating how. This journal entry resonated with me, and maybe it will with you too.
It feels especially significant to share this now, as it reflects on a moment in Grand-Staircase Escalante National Monument – an area now under threat from the current admin’s ongoing series of attacks on public lands.
“I know and yet am always surprised at the quiet sort of magic I only/always feel in the desert. Any desert.
if you asked me my favorite environment, I couldn’t tell you. There are standouts – mountains, old growth forests, coastal brush, deserts. But I couldn’t absolutely pick one.
The awe of giants, the smell of damp moss, the salty creosote breeze, the beautifully quiet solitude.
And yet.
When I think of mountains, my first thought is of that sheer visual awe. If I wanted to add depth to the description, I’d cite dramatic weather patterns, alpenglow, trickling streams, and alpine flowers.
Things I can touch and smell certainly. But mostly things I see.
When I try to describe the desert, I almost always share the way it makes me *feel.*
Solitude, faith, a centering of self, and grace.
I don’t believe in god, I don’t consider myself religious, but despite my non-belief I have never felt comfortable labeling myself an atheist.
Maybe it’s just that if I feel I can’t believe in something like the concept of god without proof, neither can I reject it wholly out of hand without any of the same.
But maybe it’s something else.
Those occasional moments of grace, rarely but fully felt. Almost always, if not actually always, in the outdoors, and even more specifically in desert spaces.
Which is not to say that the desert makes me believe in god, only that sometimes I understand why other people do, and maybe faith/spirituality and religion are different things similarly felt.
All this went through my head because last night while we camped in Grand Staircase-Escalante I crawled out of my tent to pee in the middle of the night.
I looked up at the sky and could see the milky way clearly.
With my pants around my ankles and butt squatting above the ground to pee, I felt it, one of those moments of grace in the immediacy of stars.
I don’t suppose we have much say in the timing of grace.”
Annika Bee 
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