The Vast Desert Sky
After a month in Pune, we headed for the foothills of the Himalayas, where we would spend the following month. On our way, we spent a few days in the desert in the Indian state of Rajasthan. Our home base in the desert was Jaisalmer, a small city of 80,000 about 200 miles from the Pakistani border. The city is crowned by a twelfth-century fort containing the medieval city in which a quarter of the city’s population still lives. It is known as “the golden city” for the color of the exquisitely carved sandstone of which the old city is built.
From Jaisalmer, we set out on an overnight camel safari. We took a Jeep an hour into the desert where we met our guide, Triple S, and our mounts, Romeo, Johnny, and Al Pacino. From there we rode for an hour and a half to our camp on the sand dunes. Triple S cooked us a simple and delicious meal over the fire. We watched the sunset and spent the night on cots in the open air under the stars. In the morning we watched the sunrise, ate breakfast, and rode back to meet the Jeep and return to Jaisalmer.
The quiet of the desert was the perfect restorative after the constant noise of Pune. With the land stripped nearly bare of vegetation, even the wind was quiet. We were soothed by the rhythmic tinkling of the bells each of our camels wore, the occasional flitting about or chirping of birds, and once or twice by the bleating of sheep as we passed by a grazing herd.
The desert is like the earth in meditation. In the forest, our senses are bombarded by birds, leaves, and branches in constant motion, making sounds, up close and in all directions. The light of the sky is broken by trees. In the desert the earth is still and quiet and we can see clearly.
Sutra 1.2 of the Yoga Sūtras defines the practice of yoga: yogaś citta-vṛtti-nirodhaḥ, which can be translated as “yoga is stilling the fluctuations of the mind.” Whether we are practicing yoga poses, breathing exercises, or meditation, the real practice is the same. The practice is quieting down the constant chatter going on in our heads. In the desert, some of the chatter is quieted down for us.
The desert is also harsh and unyielding; it is not a place where nourishment is easy to find. After his baptism and before he starts preaching and gathering disciples, Jesus spends 40 days and 40 nights alone in the desert. He faces starvation, and eventually the devil himself. The Desert Fathers, early and influential Christian monastics, lived as hermits and practiced extreme asceticism in the desert of Egypt. They ate and slept little. They routinely encountered demons.
When we strip away the mental chatter, the busyness, the seductive stream of incoming information, we come face to face with ourselves. We may be on the path to the garden, but we have to pass through the desert to get there. We have to face our hunger: our desires, our habits, our accumulating and clinging to things we do not need. We have to face our demons: the darker recesses of our psyche we are all too happy to ignore in our busyness, to paper over with distractions.
The desert is not all hunger and demons. When we strip away the chatter, we are able to come into contact with the infinite. The night we slept out in the desert, after the sun had set and the desert sky had darkened, the heavenly bodies began to emerge. The waxing moon, a little less than a quarter full, was still fairly high in the sky. Venus, the evening star, was first to emerge, brilliant and white, in the Western sky. Then Jupiter appeared just below it in the sky, with a faint red tint. Later, as brighter stars began to fill in, Saturn, much fainter, appeared just above Venus.
As the night wore on, one by one the heavenly bodies dipped below the horizon. By the time Jupiter disappeared, Venus, now low in the sky, had turned from brilliant white to deep burnt orange. I pulled the blankets over my head and slept fitfully for a few hours, waiting for the moon to go down. The desert air is very clear, so once it was truly dark, the sky was ablaze with thousands of stars. I lay beneath them dazzled for an hour or so, and then pulled the covers up again to wait for sunrise.
I thought of the crows that filled the trees outside our apartment in Pune. Each day the cacophony of their calls commenced at first light and reached its crescendo at sunrise. The process then repeated itself at sunset. After a night of sleep disturbed by relentless horn honking, dog barking, and other insults, their racket seemed one more nuisance. In reality it was a wake up call, to put our heads out the window and witness the everyday splendor of the sun rising and setting.
There is something deeply moving in watching the sun rise and set, the phases of the moon change over the course of the month, the constellations visible at night change over the course of the year. We feel a connection between our bodies and these massive, heavenly bodies across unfathomable distances. We feel how they are connected to a subtle energetic body that lies deeper than our everyday physical body. Our circadian rhythm is synchronized to the daily cycle of sunrise and sunset, women’s menstrual cycles to the monthly rhythm of the phase of the moon. These bodies and our bodies are part of one greater whole, one greater truth, one greater mystery.
Carl Sagan wrote beautifully about a “pale blue dot,” the Earth as seen in a photograph taken from 4 billion miles away. Our home in space, the home of every human being that has ever lived, appears as “a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.” The vastness of space, and the tininess of our place in it, can lead one to feel that life is meaningless. For me it is just the opposite. The unfathomable vastness of space is mirrored by an unfathomable vastness within.
In B.K.S. Iyengar’s translation of Sutra 2.47, he tells us that when perfection in asana is achieved “the infinite being within is reached.” The farthest object we can see with our naked eye is the Andromeda galaxy, 2.5 million light years away. Theoretically, we can see 46 billion light years, and we know the universe is a lot bigger than that, but we do not know, and as far as we know we can not know, if it is infinite or not. This is the beauty of infinity. All our words, all our measurements, all our theories are inadequate in the face of it. Yet somehow, when we gaze into the vastness of the desert sky, we know that the universe within is infinite.
This is one of a series of posts written during our travels. You can find the first post here, and you can find the next post here. You can sign up for email alerts about future posts here.
