Diana Woodcock

ARABIAN DESERT REVELATIONS

“I will seduce my love, lead her into the desert, and speak to her heart.”
                                                                                                --Hosea 2:16

Seduced and led as surely as if shackled and noosed, I’ve wound up in the desert.  But don’t get me wrong—this is no wailing song.  Far from it, it’s a call for celebration as I acknowledge the soul’s penetration by earth’s beauty, creation’s oneness.  Caught up in the rhythm and flow of desert seasons, sparseness and apparent emptiness, the heart opens wide to scarcity, hunger, thirst—and it thrives.

Led into the desert, I quickly learn this is no place for the faint-hearted.  Inborn, biophilic needs awaken.  And I, shaken out of complacency, seek out the secretive ones—follow footprints and body indentations across the sand.  Often I yearn for the Everglades—those days trolling marsh edges with snowy egrets.  But the desert also is a gift.  Less flamboyant than the Everglades, but once I let the sidra tree speak to me, I was a goner—dunes singing, shamal wind ringing the rim of the Inland Sea.  So here, too, I watch and wait for a chance to participate in synthesis—a guest trying her best not to be invasive in this far from empty desert on the Arabian Gulf’s midwestern coast.  An oil flare-shaped peninsula chiseled by wind and sea, golden-brown of arid desert, pale cream of coastal salt flats, here and there the green of farms and date palm plantations.  On three sides a sea inspiring these questions: How can it be that exquisitely blue-green?  Could windblown sand alone hone the limestone plateau edges into giant mushrooms and spindly pinnacles?  How exactly do green forests of mangroves attract greater flamingos in? 

As for the dunes—crescent-shaped barchans fifty meters high, long undulating seifs striding southward ahead of the prevailing northwesterly shamal to a tidal lagoon marking the southern border—is it all by Someone’s divine order?  Taking my time, I wind my way around this coast, determined to make the most of desert living.  The shamal blows me away with the dunes—haunts and uplifts, implants a grain to stop my watch on the present moment.  I kneel beside the sea as a gull’s wings shadow me. 

Let me relive again one treasured day at this exquisite zoological crossroads—an August day.

***                 

The sidra tree shook in the shamal.  Nearby a wadi waited for winter rains.  Sand-colored gerbils and girds zigzagged between desert squash and acacia.  Lesser jerboas hibernated in their subterranean burrows a meter below ground.  A Persian nightingale sang its fluty song among a throng of short-toed larks.  A rear-fanged sand snake lazed lethargically beside the wadi as the desert gave no hint of Earth’s potential for autumn.  Dreams of a lusher locale—of apples, pumpkins, plums—whetted my appetite like a mirage.  But one succumbs to aridity and scarcity—learns to do without, remembers this is what the Desert Fathers were all about. 

One day, not a grain of sand stirs—it can be stiflingly still.  The next, a shamal wind flings a limb of the sidra against my window pane, shattering glass and shield from the searing sun. 

The dried-up wadi waited.   A desert wheatear dozed in the acacia’s shade.  Winter would come again—the rains, wildflowers spreading across the barren waste with lavish fleeting grace—essential truths spoken in the language of delicate blossoms, prying open Earth’s unspeakable secrets.  And I would understand what the searing sand says.  But just then, alone, summer in the desert—birds hiding, keeping silent (save for one bulbul)—I imagined the caravans that passed this way, the village by the sea at the desert’s verge whose men dived their whole lives for pearls.  I hoped for at least one stray camel, one oryx, one palm dove intoxicated on dates, one honey badger to lead me into the shade or a burrow under the sand to sleep through the day-long heat. 

Still I would weep—no one more surprised than I—when time came to leave the desert.  All this desolation.  And yet, where the biosphere’s thin layer of complexity astounds.  Across the sand, a false cobra left its dimpled pulse of an imprint.  Brown leaves whirling in a grim garden.  Late summer aridity.  No clouds.  No hope of rain till winter.  Flowers gone to seed.  All dust and decay.  Vicarious suffering, my body was showing traces.  Fulminating sun crackled, shattering the day.

Only at the edge—where expats and wealthy natives live with views of Arabian Gulf waters—do bougainvillea, hibiscus and oleander thrive, fragile blossoms not hardy
enough to survive without doting attention of faithful gardeners.  But I would be the plain acacia or date palm—self-sufficiently strong. I would embrace the desert, as Rumi advised—cozy up to it as if it were a welcome fire on a wintry afternoon.  I’d find my laughter, let it carry me through the flames till I myself became droplets of rain.

A seamlessness exists in all this barrenness—a sand-brown transience that shouldn’t be missed: quiet inlets with gentle ripples, springtime with desert hyacinths blossoming, the season of mists when the desert scrub drips with moisture.  This is the place to enter the cloister of one’s own design—take all the time one needs to simply be. 

I often hear myself laughing like the gulls I keep company with on the desert’s moist lip.  Feet touching sand, I whirl in my patched frock—arms outstretched like wings of red-crowned cranes.  When I hear someone whisper, She’s gone insane, I smile.  Chiffon dresses given away, I’ve let the winds replace my tambourines.  No need now of wasta* or the mathematics of probability, I’m content beside a wadi in the shade of a sidra tree.

*Arabic for influence or having connections.

Diana Woodcockis never happier than when she’s swaying on some elephant’s shoulders in the heart of the Golden Triangle, or when she’s meditating in the shade of a sidra tree deep in the Arabian Desert.  Having traveled extensively as a gwai lo, she now longs to settle down and make mandalas on the Tibetan Plateau.   Planning now to give everything away save the patched frock, she envisions spending her remaining earthly days whirling dervishly, arms raised in praise like wings of a red-crowned crane.

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