#desertmedicine

Yoga is experiential. No amount of theory can replace practice, in the same way that no combination of words can adequately convey my experience of the desert. My word selection can never do the desert justice.

The jeep starts up the steep incline. All you can see in front of you is cream sand with shadows rippling across like the traces of liquid. It is the sea. It isn’t the sea. It’s the sea I’ve grown up with and yet it’s not. There’s a familiarity and yet it’s new. A new way of seeing. Things are what they seem and yet they’re not. It puts me in a strange new place. As though everything is rearranged? Upside down? I just can’t put my finger on it and I do like to put my finger on things. I like certainty. And yet, I feel calm and excited at the same time. Like it’s all in my cells and always has been. We ascend. Five in the car, the joviality and laughing and giggling and cracking up is no more. Each with our own thoughts, or no thoughts, we sound at peace.

The desert is a spiritual experience for me and I don’t consider myself particularly spiritual. Connected maybe, spiritual – not. I wonder whether what I feel in the desert is the feeling that religious people experience at church or maybe in prayer. For me, there is no middleman, no conduit, no dilution. That the desert is a powerful, inexplicable, intangible, yet tangible, force is the only way I can describe it.

Colours of sand ripple pass us as the jeep climbs and a horizon of blue slowly creeps into view at the top of the windscreen and seems to descend like a sky blue blind being drawn down the windscreen, as we drive. More and more blue, less and less cream until …

The jeep mounts the peak of the dune and comes horizontal. I feel as though the ground has dropped away and we’re balancing on a knife’s edge. I stop breathing. It’s a cinematic experience. It’s reminiscent of being on the rim of a volcano, like Ngorongoro, looking down into the crater floor, except sand, sky and rock are a myriad of shades of pink, cream, beige, orange and lilac. From this vantage point, where ours are the only tyre tracks, we look out and down onto sandy plains with… out here in the middle of nowhere… green dotted lines of olive saplings amidst lines of tubes carrying water. Massive commercial plantations, way out here, our backs to a lunar landscape. The jeep tilts forward and down, sharply. I can feel the tyres gripping.

Hours earlier, driving through fluffy sand, the jeep stopped. There was the sound of grinding. The driver changes gear and we reversed out of where we could no longer go forward, leaving deep tracks. The driver picks his path carefully. He is silent. He is looking. Searching. Here too, there are no tyre tracks. Just when I think we’ll have to turn back because white rocks and precipices block the way, he finds a way. At one moment, the bottom of the car scraped over rock. He manoeuvres forward and what I thought was a precipice becomes a sandy way out, between outcrops of rock. All this, to a thoughtfully curated soundtrack, from orchestral music to what, from the beat and the high energy, I assume to be Libyan revolutionary songs.

The Amazigh ‘Free Man’ symbol has recently been painted on the jeep we’re in but, it seems I can no longer think or analyse ideas of freedom or anything else. For once, I simply am.