Beauty of the Desert

Both desert and water can hold me spellbound. I have stood in front of a lot of waterbodies in awe. I grew up by the side of a stream which not only bathed my childhood in its serene coolness but also taught me about its destructive potential in the season of monsoon. But I am yet to see a desert except in pictures and movies.

Water and desert. Opposites that generate two different longings. One, to dissolve into something fluid and dynamic. The other, the longing to stand alone before ultimate silence. The desert creates thirst and water becomes revelation. As Antoine de Saint-Exupery put it unforgettably: “What makes the desert beautiful is that it hides a well somewhere.”

The first thought that came to my mind on seeing the following WhatsApp forward from my friend Rev Jose Maliekal was Little Prince’s statement quoted above.

Seen from the beach, water is scenery. It is abundant, overwhelming, almost taken for granted. But in the desert, a single drop acquires meaning. Acquires life.

We, human beings, understand things most deeply through deprivation rathe than abundance.

Loneliness teaches the meaning of companionship.

Silence teaches the value of words.

Illness teaches the miracle of health.

Exile teaches the warmth of home.

The ocean makes you admire water. The desert makes you need it.

Does abundance dull our perception? And scarcity sharpen our consciousness?

The desert makes us search more than the ocean. No wonder the Biblical Yahweh made the Jews wander in the desert for decades.

No wonder T S Eliot wrote lines such as:

Here is no water but only rock / Rock and no water and the sandy road.

And

If there were water / And no rock / If there were rock? / And also water”

Absence of water is spiritual agony in Eliot’s poem. No wonder why so many sages and mystics rushed to deserts for enlightenment.

 It is Saint-Exupery’s Little Prince that returns to me again and again, Eliot’s agony notwithstanding. After mentioning the beauty of the desert’s well, Little Prince goes on to say: “Whether it’s a house or the stars or the desert, what makes them beautiful is invisible!”

The visible world is only the surface of deeper realities.

Beauty begins where appearances end.