Lake Tamarisk, Revisited - the Need for a Personal Oasis

 

 All those years

forgetting

how everything

has its own voice

to make itself heard.

All those years

forgetting

how easily

you can belong

to everything simply by listening.

David Whyte

From “The House of Belonging”

 

I just love this Post,  which I first posted in, I think, 2015.  In the early 2000's I was doing the Los Angeles Renaissance Faire,  and coming from Southern Arizona to Southern California I passed through a long, empty stretch of desert.  It was a difficult time for me, with many emotional and financial stresses, and I developed the habit of always stopping at Lake Tamarisk, an Oasis very literally in the middle of nowhere.  It became my personal Oasis, a place of rest, beauty, hydration, silence and renewal.  I think everyone needs such a place as we proceed on the caravanserai of our lives.  Lake Tamarisk was one of those places for me.  

I don't make that drive much any more, but I remember Lake Tamarisk like a mirage in my imagination.  Me, sitting on a bench, watching the sun go down in the middle of no-where and no-when,  observing birds, water, air, letting it all speak to me.  

Today is, as they say, the first day of the rest of your life.  Here's a little story about an Oasis I found. 

 

LAKE   TAMARISK 

On my way to and from  Los Angeles, in the very middle of the California desert between Blythe and Indio,  is a mostly abandoned town called Desert Center. A sad circle of dead palm trees on the side of the highway attest to better days.   Desert Center once hosted General Patton's army training corps during World War II, and it has remnants of that time, mostly abandoned, when it was a place of lively business.  

I'm old enough to remember when the old diner was still in operation, if very dilapidated.  I used to like to stop for some not very good soup so I could sit at the counter and imagine the  soldiers  sitting there on stools at the counter  in prosperous times, maybe big band music playing on a radio while cooks fried eggs and potatoes.  But now it's just boarded up, and has been for a decade, and dust blows through the remains of every structure there, except, surprisingly, the post office - which suggests the presence of life and commerce somewhere, hidden away in the seemingly barren  recesses of Desert Center,  California.


However, the ghostly town of Desert Center is not what I write about............actually, as I sit here in a coffee shop in Los Angeles, having traversed the desert, enduring now  the ubiquitous sound of pounding rock and roll in the background (why is silence  seemingly so terrifying to people now,  even at 6:30 in the morning?  Why does it seem that  people no longer seem  able to eat, drink, shop, walk, or even  talk with each other without a  pulsing backdrop of  guitars and drums or screaming singers proclaiming their lust?).........ah.

The vast cacophony of the 21st Century, in which Silence is frightening.  

Yes.  What I  reflect on is actually a strange oasis some 15 miles from Desert Center's ruins called Lake Tamarisk. 

I first discovered it when I noticed, driving on the interstate at night, a circle of lights past Desert Center.  On a whim,  I decided to investigate.  What on earth is that, I wondered, in the middle of no where?  What I found was a lake reflecting the moon,  lawns with the tinkle of sprinklers, a wading white crane, and Silence surrounded by the dark mystery of the desert.  

So ever since I've stopped for an hour or two at Lake Tamarisk  as I've made that long trek to L.A.   Like the movie Pleasantville, it seems to me sometimes  that Lake Tamarisk is a kind of mirage, suspended in time.  That someday I'll look for it and it will have simply disappeared without a trace.

It seems to me as well that it's always about 1970 there, or maybe 1960,   when the little town was  built to house the Kaiser mine workers and their families.     I don't know if it has always been surrounded with lawns for golfing, but its little man-made lake reflects the colors of the desert, and birds float on its placid surface, and it derives its name from that.  

There is no store, no gas station, no restaurant there, and for such amenities  one must go some 50 miles.  But  there is a fire department and a community center and a little library.  They are always closed when I get there, the deck chairs stacked, the barbecues padlocked.  

I'm always there in late  spring or summer, when the winter people have left, and Silence is  what greets me in the empty parking lot beside the always closed community center.  Along with the occasional call of la Paloma, the desert  dove,  wind in palm trees, distant sprinklers and perhaps  a duck on the lake.  In all my rituals of visiting Lake Tamarisk,  I've never heard the sound of  a human voice, although clearly there are people who live there all year.  I've  walked around the lake,  never meeting a soul, and walking to the  edge of the grass or the paved walkway I  marvel at the way everything simply ENDS.  Take a step further, and you are in the vastness of empty desert.

There is a  swimming pool  that looks exactly like every swimming pool I remember from my Southern California childhood, complete with round metal tables and a  snack bar with rusty signs proclaiming Coca Cola! .........but it's usually empty, the gate locked.  I  have only seen it filled once, but no one was there..........still, it is not just a mirage, if it is sometimes full of water. 

I always find myself standing at the gate to the pool, and I can almost hear the faint sounds of  people drinking cokes and eating hot dogs.  Men in swimming trunks, women with one piece bathing suits, kids splashing and  bouncing on inflated inner tubes.  Girls in polka dot bathing caps with hula hoops.   I always feel a bit sad at such moments, as if they will all appear after I leave, when the sun goes down maybe. 

And I'm not invited any more, because somehow, I grew up.......

But what I do breath in, enroute and returning, is the Silence I find at that strange little Oasis.  An Oasis, for me, not just in space, here in the desert, but in Time as well.   A place of Silence.    Silence to hear the sounds of the desert, the wind, the here and now of nature.  Silence to relax into, silence with room for gratitude, silence enough  to hear the sounds of sweet memory and the bittersweet voices of ghosts as well.  

Silence out of time.  

"Poets live with silence: 

the silence before the poem; 

the silence whence the poem comes; 

the silence in between the words,

as you drink the words, 

watch them glide through your mind, 

feel them slide down your throat

towards your heart 

the silence which you share with the poet

when the poem ends, sitting side by side"

.....Michael Shepard

Silent Peacocks: Personal Reflections on the Need for Sacred Solitude

Here is another article, this from around this time in 2019, that I just revised for publication submission.  It means a lot to me, that moment, that place.  I think the time is coming to return again.  Perhaps this is where I'll spend the Solstice.........

(December 19, 2019)

I am at the Holy Trinity Monastery in St. David, Arizona.  It is raining, and the only sound is the gentle fall of rain on leafless trees, droplets of water, little shining crystals on the dark branches before my window. 

And on the banister of the terrace before me are 5 peacocks and peahens, their magnificent, extravagant, impossible iridescent tails hanging over the edge.  They are just sitting there, making no sounds. I remember peacocks as noisy creatures, with a piercing cry.  How strange those peacocks are, motionless, silent.  I know that if they become aware of me, they will run off, so I join them in their silence for a moment, unmoving, aware of only peacocks, and the sound of rain. 

The Monastery is so quiet in fact, there are not even sounds of sparrows or ravens, no dogs or coyotes. It is also mostly deserted, probably because it is winter and mid-week.  The land has the familiar peace I have so often found in places of worship, a peace rising through the soil as one walks, an essence of place stepped and pressed into the land itself.  It does not matter what I "believe" in such places.... prayerful or sacred places are not about the intellect.  

There is a striking statue of Saint Benedict by the cloisters; he is holding a book, and there is a raven at his feet with, apparently, a rock in his beak. * I do not know what the raven means, but the white statue is welcoming.  I find myself watching my breath as I walk, clasping my hands behind my back.  Maybe the monks who lived here did that, and I am just picking up a memory in the land. 

The Benedictine Monastery in the small eastern Arizona town of St. David is actually no longer a Monastery, not since 2017 when the Vatican recalled the few monks and Father still living here.  It clearly once had a good-sized population that gradually diminished. As I walk, I try to imagine monks here, tending to the gardens, the shrines, the retreat buildings in the rain, or in the hot summers of this part of the country.   It is still managed by a faithful group of volunteer Oblates.  I notice that they are all elderly……I wonder if they will be able to attract younger people in the future to manage this special place? It seems, as I reflect with the meditative presence of the peacocks before me, that it is a great shame that the monastic life is so little appreciated in our frenetic world.    

Last evening, as the sun went down behind rows of pecan trees, I saw the flock of peacocks, some 20 of them, sitting on a fence before a particularly ancient pecan tree.  I watched as, one by one, they flew without sound into the tree, finding their particular perches.  Each bird seemed to wait patiently for his or her own “take-off”. This was clearly a daily ritual.   I was struck by how orderly this procession of the peacocks to their nightly roost took place. 

Peacocks……… one thinks of them as loud, stupid birds.  Yet at the St. David Monastery, where many generations of peacocks have lived and roamed freely, they are a tribe going about their business.  Just as the Monastery is devoted to silence and prayer, so they also seem to be.  They are wrapped in brilliant shades of quietude.  Beautiful in their other worldly iridescence among the gray and brown of winter leaves.

 

How did I end up here?  Not entirely sure.  By Grace? 

As I was driving without a destination a day ago, I vividly remembered a book I read (while spending the night on a bench in the ultimate liminal zone of Heathrow Airport) called

“The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Frye”. ** The central character, Harold, is in his 60’s, living a conservative retired life with his wife.  They do not really speak any more, as they navigate around each other with many years of habitual co-inhabitation.  One day Harold receives a letter from someone he has not seen in over 20 years, someone who is dying of cancer in a hospice far away to the north of the U.K.  She has written to let Harold know she remembers him fondly, and to say goodbye.  In his habitual numbness, but equally habitual English sense of propriety, he decides to write her a simple letter, a card that says something like “thank you for your friendship, best wishes, Harold Frye”.  He does so, and then decides to walk to the post office in order to mail it himself. 

Except when he gets to the post office, he decides to walk on to the next Post Office, one at the north of town, and mail it there.  And yet, when he gets to that post office, on the outskirts of town, he discovers that he still has the letter in his pocket, and he is still walking.  And so, the unplanned and unannounced and even unconscious pilgrimage of Harold Frye commences. 

Perhaps I am like Harold.  I just decided I needed to get away, from the Holidays, from Facebook, from cars, away from all the noise, and the noise incessantly sounding in my own head, right now:  but I had no idea of where to go. None.  

But I have a car, and a credit card.  All the way down 22^nd street to the freeway, I still couldn’t decide where I was going…. west, to Phoenix, maybe Sedona? A long way, and Sedona is expensive.  Or south, to Patagonia?  Head to New Mexico, the solace of those wide-open mystical spaces…. even though it is an even longer way than Sedona?  It was only when I got to the freeway underpass that I pulled into the left lane for route 19, heading in the direction of Patagonia, which at least had a bird sanctuary and a coffee shop.  I’d see what happened from there. 

As I drove, I felt better.  I turned my phone off.  In Patagonia I had a coffee, discovered that the only hotel (cleverly cowboy vintage)      was ridiculously expensive, then thought what the heck, I’ll head to New Mexico, why not. The mood I’m in I could drive all night anyway.   The road from Patagonia to I-10 is scenic, with a snow-covered mountain range in the distance.  In Saint David, a little town on the way to Benson, I remembered there was a Benedictine Monastery. Always curious about it, I stopped, inquired about retreats, and here I am.  Ask and ye shall receive, truly. 

Lately I’ve been having those winter-born (what a wonderful word, “winterborne”) …… “dark nights of the soul” ………. which look, practically speaking, more like being overwhelmed, brittle, snappish, and exhausted and increasingly disturbed by it. I am running a successful AIRBNB “enclave”, still working thus in the “service industry” at the age of 70. 

I have to work and know few who can afford not to these days. I am glad sometimes that no one much notices me, or my current inner landscape. To me, of late, everything sounds like “yap yap yap”.  Sometimes I feel like contemporary life is a bit like being endlessly barked at by a chihuahua.  Our modern world - an entire fleet of chihuahuas. A demanding litany of inconsequential complaint, vented commentary, monologue for the sake of attention, appeals for money, offers for deals, electronic voices, irritated drivers……exhausting. And, as I am an empath, all the human pain in there too, all the loneliness and fear and despair and grief and human pain I can’t help, and increasingly feel too frayed to listen to.  

When I’m not “in service” changing sheets or scrubbing floors, I am an artist.  (Yes, one can be an “emerged” artist and not wealthy.  In fact, most artists have to find other means of support.) The artifacts of that 50-year career surround my property.  I have to say, running an AIRBNB has been somewhat deflating, as I have noticed that most people don’t think about art unless it is in a museum or a gallery.  Or now, I suppose, on Instagram.  Instant art for an increasingly microscopic attention span! 

For myself, art is a language, albeit an often-archaic language, one that one has to be educated in, like learning to speak Latin. Certainly, it requires what our lives increasingly lack ......contemplation. Patience.  Without that introduction, and time, artworks are just a backdrop that ‘specialists’ understand, dismissed as irrelevant.  

Or a colorful passing tidbit to consume like a candy. 

People do not see that a painting is a conversation, a window into another world……in this case, my world.  For me, the works have numinous names and places in the landscape of my life.   The bodies of work on my property are the best of me, my personal shrines and devotions, and now I just want to protect them from the infidels, so to speak. 

If they don’t see it, it is safe, and those visionary depths the paintings and sculptures arose from (in me) are also underground.  Even if they are in plain sight.   

How do I feel about all of this?  I often question my discontent; I am often despairing of contemporary life.  Yet here, in a monastery where many came to seek God........it doesn’t matter whether I am “right” or “wrong” in my discontent.  It doesn’t matter what I think at all. 

I sit on a bench and listen to the melancholy voice of Saturn.  Wise and winter-borne Saturn. 

I contemplate a cast-off, brightly turquoise, feather on the ground, gleaming as it catches a bit of sun.  Here I am, enjoying this pentimento under the surface of time, given the grace and simplicity to turn under, within, below the fallen leaves, into the dark.  It occurs to me that it does not matter at all what I “think” I should do once I rejoin the noise and distractions of life.  Here is refuge, here is the power of silence.  Silence enough to listen, and my soul, for lack of a better word, is speaking. 

 

“When we are living in accord with our inner reality while simultaneously suffering the depredations of this discordant, dis-eased world, we nonetheless have supportive energy, clarifying affects, and a sense of purpose.  When we get off track, these same manifestations turn against us.  While the world rushes to pharmacology to numb the inner discord, the question remaining is simply and obviously this:  What does the soul want, as opposed to our protective but regressive complexes?  This simple question is intimidating because such an agenda can very quickly lead to the larger rather than the smaller in our lives, necessarily re-framing our sense of what our life journey is about.” 

James Hollis PhD.  “Living an Examined Life” 

As the Winter Solstice approaches, I bless the Dark, the nourishment that comes from this time of incubational dormancy, from quietude.  I am grateful to have stumbled into welcoming refuge for a few days.  To sit listening to the rain and privileged to join the silent, watchful witness of a great iridescent beauty that sits on a fence before me, waiting to be noticed, listening to the rain.  

 

Dec. 2019

*I learn later that the Raven was a friend of Saint Benedict who helped him by removing bread that had been poisoned by a jealous rival.  http://communio.stblogs.org/index.php/2011/07/saint-benedict-and-his-friend/

** The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Frye by Rachel Joyce (https://www.rachel-joyce.co.uk/)

“I love where we live. I love the stretch of sky from east to west. I work in a shepherd’s hut in a field, looking over the valley. It’s a place that feels alive with light and water and stories. My own view. My own silence.”

 …. Rachel Joyce

POSTSCRIPT

Shortly after I posted this article in my Blog (www.threadsofspiderwoman.blogspot.com) I found this earring by the trash can in front of my house.  It looks a great deal like a peacock feather to me!   I have no idea where it came from, but I will take it as a bit of guidance and affirmation.  The world is always speaking to us, I reflect, if we can only pause long enough to listen.