Desert Man (Personal Essay)
We all come to the desert looking for something….
He came to the desert to find himself. He sang a song called “Chocolate Man” that blew us away. He was carrying a burden. He was lost, he shared after a brief conversation. We all come to the desert looking for something.
I knew his kind. The kind that escapes the big city for an open space where you know no one. The kind that goes to an open mic night just to see who else might be out there in that big open desert. The kind that wants to hear what others at an open mic night have to say in a big open desert. The kind that wants to be heard.
I heard him. I knew his burden.
“How old are you?” I asked after he shared that he had come to the desert to find himself.
“45.” he said.
“Makes sense,” I said, feeling like an expert on lost people. I was one of them.
“How long have you been in it?” I asked.
“One-and-a-half years,” he responded without hesitation. He had been counting the time.
“It’s brutal, isn’t it?” I said.
“Yeah,” he agreed, “it is.”
This lost-and-found stuff is no joke. Sometimes, when you stop knowing yourself, all that really makes sense is lying on a big rock in a wide-open space where it feels like all the stars in the universe can see you. It’s the kind of space where the desire for self-discovery is all-consuming. There is no backseat to this existential crisis.
The stripping is the key. The stripping of all familiar trappings is essential to reclaiming the soul. Gotta lose in order to get. The serpent shedding its skin. Your sense of self slips away so stealthily that you don’t even know it has gone missing until, one day, it’s not there and you no longer recognize yourself. Done and gone, like a thief disappearing into the night. And by then, all you can do is go calling and calling for it until, one day, after many days, you hear a response, rather than an echo.
One-and-a-half years, he told me. That’s how long I had been waiting to hear a response and preparing for my own stripping—even though I didn’t know it then.
Now that I am on the other side, I no longer feel the same crisis of faith, that utter disconnect from self that he was sitting in, because I had already engineered my escape. I had mastered the art of leaving nearly everything and everyone behind in one fell swoop. But that didn’t mean that I felt found. Oh no, not by a long shot. I had fallen so far that, unbeknownst to me, climbing up the mountaintop wouldn’t be that much easier than just getting myself out of the hole. It turns out, getting found isn’t that much easier than getting lost. So just how long would it take to make that ascent, to feel at home once again? That would be anyone’s guess. So, go to the desert.
I heard the desert man’s song the same night I met the hearse couple. We were all in attendance at the same open mic night in the desert. When the hearse couple sang, their harmonies about Mid-western towns that they had to leave floated straight to my heart. The harmonies prompted me to do something I almost never do. I talked to them after the show. I learned their story.
The wife had been a traveling nurse for 20 years. Then, one day, during Covid, all those elective surgeries were canceled and with them, her job. Gone.
“Midwestern town, you’re broken down, won’t you let me gooooooo,” came the harmonized tunes floating across the room.*
First, she lost her job, then her house. Out of all that chaos, the decision was made to buy a hearse. They named her Tania. The back was the sleeping quarters. The mid-section carried the instruments. And that’s how the hearse became a tour bus, carrying this couple around the country again and again. Singing for their supper and meeting new friends and followers with every stop.
“Well everyone has a story, if they're staying in this town,” goes the song’s opening line.
During our conversation, I discovered that the husband, like me, was in his mid-forties. Again, I nodded in recognition.
That was the right age for life to kick you in the pants and for you to decide it was a good idea to tour the country in a hearse, so you could hit up open mic nights in the desert along the way. So you could meet people one night just to bid them farewell a few hours later and tell them that you’d see them again the next time around.
The desert man. The hearse couple. These people were my people. We were a motley crew, but everyone belonged. The desert did that for us.
“Midwestern town, you’re broken down, won’t you let me gooooooo,” came the chorus again.
Gotta get to the desert.
Gotta see where the sand meets the mountains, leaving nothing in between.
“Midwestern town, you’re broken down, won’t you let me gooooooo,” they sang over and over again.
Gotta get lost. Gotta find all the lost people to see yourself and believe that one day, any day now, all that lost time will add up to something that takes flight and leads you back home.
“Midwestern town, you’re broken down, won’t you let me gooooooo….”
The desert is an endless sea of loneliness, brokenheartedness, and prayer.
Go to the desert to see yourself.
Go to the desert to be seen by the stars.
Go to the desert to believe in something bigger than you.
Go.