The Desert is My Monastery
How Meteora, the Mojave, and McDonalds taught me about the power of solitude.
The desert is a funny place. It has so many connotations.
For some, the desert is only experienced while driving through it as fast as possible to get somewhere else. This desert is more a dumping ground than a destination. A place where you don’t want to break down.
Those with a romantic notion of the desert probably read Edward Abbey or Paul Bowles. Or maybe they’re a T.E. Lawrence or Peter O’Toole fan. This desert is beautiful, and exotic. But it’s viewed through someone else’s eyes, the Hollywood version of arid landscape.
Still, others might be throwing up dust on the weekends with their 4x4 toys, or casting aside inhibitions in raver outfits to bass-heavy beats. Or maybe they’re just kicking up their feet to watch High Desert on Apple+.
The few natural born dwellers I know admit that they were ready to leave the moment the opportunity presented itself, and that most long-term residents are in the desert not by choice but instead because they are too broke or too broken to live any place else.
My desert tribe is a bit different. Well, I’m not sure I can even call it a tribe. I haven’t really met enough of us, but I hear we’re out here, walking the hills of creosote and sagebrush looking for one another. Or maybe I’m just hoping there are others like me.
“The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.” —Aldous Huxley
I am a desert monk.
I have a little cabin high above the desert floor. It’s perched on a granite ridge, and has a view that quite literally makes me lightheaded. Or maybe that’s because it’s at 5,400 feet. They call it the high desert for a reason.
The desert is my monastery; a house of contemplation. I can hike for miles as my mind skips across the horizon. Or I can sit on the porch, a lounging lizard captivating me in metaphysical conversation. Even subtle things, like the way the light changes from pre-dawn to dawn–much more beautiful than any sunrise – becomes a mantra. I still haven’t missed a sunrise when I stay overnight.
Every day is constant. Every day, a little different.
My pilgrimage has been a 25 year journey that started in Greece, a land with a long history of monks, but not known for its deserts.
As a young boy, I wanted to be Indiana Jones. He was always trekking to distant lands to dig up cool old shit, put the pieces back together, find a cute girl, get into a little trouble, and shoot a few bad guys along the way. I told people I wanted to be an archaeologist just like Dr. Jones. In college, I chose ancient history for my major because they didn’t offer archaeology. When I got the chance to study abroad, my Classics professor told me to go to Greece. Indy would like Greece.
How could a 20 year old college kid with an awkward man-crush on Harrison Ford have a hard time enjoying Greece for a semester? The place looked like the set of the next Indy film. There were plenty of artifacts to decipher. Trouble could be found along any side street, and the Aegean beaches were bursting with bikinis.
But I was more of an archeology nerd than Indiana Jones. I studied hard, and spent most of my free time in the artifacts laboratory. I wrote daily to my girlfriend back home, awkwardly averting my eyes from any flirtatious gazes. I was prudish, and judgmental of all the oat-sowing going on around me. On Friday nights, I would sit in the dark listening for the hundredth time to the mixtape my girlfriend had made while my classmates enjoyed too much retsina and Moroccan hash at the taverna down the street.
“I need to be alone. I need to ponder my shame and my despair in seclusion; I need the sunshine and the paving stones of the streets without companions, without conversation, face to face with myself, with only the music of my heart for company.” —Henry Miller
The tensions started to eat at me until they reached crisis levels on Thanksgiving Day, 1999.
Thanksgiving was a special holiday in my family, and this was the first time I was away from home. The school had offered a Thanksgiving Dinner, but turkey souvlaki seemed a poor substitute for my mom’s stuffing and mashed potatoes. I was homesick. So I did what many Americans have done in similar situations. I walked to the nearest McDonalds and drowned my sorrows in a #2 Value Meal and a chocolate shake.
Not my proudest Enlightened Omnivore moment.
While I ate my twin cheeseburgers, I could hear Elvis’ Hound Dog playing softly in the background. I locked eyes with the Ronald McDonald statue across the room, that creepy red smile and painted on eyebrows, and I started to cry.
I cried because I was lonely. I cried because I felt abandoned. I cried because I was different and misunderstood. I cried because I was scared of the world and what it had in store for me.
Finally, the tears stopped, and I decided I had to get away from there. Not just the McDonalds, but that school. While everyone else was headed to the clubs and beaches for the long weekend, I would take a pilgrimage of my own design. But where to?
As I walked back to my apartment, I saw a poster in the window of a travel agency. There was a picture of Meteora.
Meteora is one of the most photographed regions of Greece. It’s a geological phenomenon. Once under a mighty prehistoric ocean millions of years ago, tectonic upheaval lifted the sandstone sea floor toward the sky. Over ions, these fossil-strewn cliffs were then eroded by wind and rain until only stellae and spires remained, reaching up into the sky like sentinels keeping watch over the green valley below.
Meteora is also one of the most religious spots in all of Greece. During Byzantine times, troglodyte monks found that the nooks and crannies were a great place to hide away and contemplate God. When the caves filled up, these fastidious friars built whole monasteries hanging off the edges and tips of rock practically suspended in air. Back in the day, before tourists, the only way up to these hermitages was via a rickety wooden mule-powered elevator. But now, probably thanks to some UNESCO funding, tourists are welcome, and convenient stairs are cut right into the rock.
“We must become so alone, so utterly alone, that we withdraw into our innermost self. It is a way of bitter suffering. But then our solitude is overcome, we are no longer alone, for we find that our innermost self is the spirit, that it is God, the indivisible. And suddenly we find ourselves in the midst of the world, yet undisturbed by its multiplicity, for our innermost soul we know ourselves to be one with all being.” —Hermann Hesse
I decided I could be a monk for the weekend. I started to journal. I began to pray. I stopped talking. I put one foot in front of the other to the top of each and every monastery. Over the next three days, Meteora awakened a spirituality within me that I’d buried back in Sunday School. It was less about God–although he was there too–and more about learning to be alone with myself and my own thoughts. With each step I contemplated my life, my choices, my opportunities. And as the hot sun beat down on me, the silence began to speak to me. It was telling me to turn that overwhelming loneliness into solitude.
Every monk deserves a monastery. And I found mine 20 years into my pilgrimage. My little cabin perched high up on the hill is an oasis of introspection, a testament to the transformative power of choosing solitude over loneliness. Meteora taught me the art of being alone. But the Mojave reminds me that being alone with my thoughts is the closest I’ll ever get to the truth.
I hope you enjoyed today’s post. After all those years, I still want to be an archaeologist, but not the Indiana Jones or academic type. Today, I want to be a literary archaeologist who finds meaningful fragments of lives lived, and strings them together into stories that others want to hear. Should I continue a series of posts about the desert, much like my current series, The Myths About Beef? If you’ve enjoyed this post, like it, and share it with friends, or get a free subscription, or better yet, become a paid subscriber. Although writing is incredibly cathartic for me, I’d like it to start paying more of the bills too. So help a brother out, subscribe!
See you next time. Remember, everything in moderation!
something about this one brought tears to my eyes. Maybe it's imagining you feeling so alone on that McDonald's Thanksgiving. But then the inspiration to go all the way into your solitude, and how that's fed your spirit ever since - reminder to me to honor solitude and silence in my own way. Thank you for sharing this.