Somewhere in the Desert Lies a Well

Although I’ve never been in an actual desert, I feel I know it.  I’ve been in the sparse steppe of Central Anatolia and know that once you are out hiking in a landscape that appears barren, every outcropping and every tree infested with mistletoe, the shape of every hill, every delicate flower—numberless as the stars—that pops up in spring, every feature of the ground’s face is loved more in a land of ostensible lack.  I know the desert because I live in Flint—a desert—no sand but acres of emptiness without living water.  I follow the waterways every day, tracing the meandering line of Gilkey Creek down to the Flint River, thinking about Abraham and yearning to hear the Word of the Lord.

Talk about a failed life.  Abraham was 75.  He and Sarai had no children, and he was still living in his “father’s house” at the time the Lord told him to “Go from your country and your kindred … to a land that I will show you.”  He set out from Ur, settled in Haran, but quickly headed south again:  Shechem, Bethel, Negeb, Egypt, Hebron.  Abraham became a restless wanderer on the face of the earth, like Cain, except he hadn’t killed his brother and he refused the false safety of cities, preferring instead the rugged high country Canaan to the lush Jordan plain.  Displacement from country and separation from kin seemed necessary for Abraham to hear God speaking.  But how could he be sure it was God and not the desert wind picking up the songline of his own desire for the blessing of offspring?  I don’t think he could be sure … nor do I think we need to be sure when we set out.  All travel is, to some extent, directionless.  All travel is, like Abraham’s, in one sense a travailing that is intimately connected with the quest for birth.  Yes, even at the age of 75, even at the age of 100.  Even at my age of 52:  yes, I, too, want to be born again.  And Abraham’s journey was perilous.  He knew men would try to kill him because of his beautiful wife:  “pretend you are my sister,” he told Sarai, not once but twice!  She was given away to Pharaoh in Egypt and to the King of Gerar.  In both cases, God intervened and rescued the matriarch.  Raiding tribes carried off his nephew, Lot.  Water was always in short supply and the need for grazing land became ever more important as Abraham’s flocks increased.  He moved in stages, weaving a path across the land that had been promised him (“how am I to know that I shall possess it?”) between places where he’d built altars that commemorated times when the Lord spoke, the Lord appeared, the Lord promised.  

For Abraham (and probably for Muhammad, too) the life of vital experience, symbolized by the journey, would not have been possible without the song—the voice of God in his ears singing:  “I will make your seed like the dust of the earth—could a man count the dust of the earth, so too, your seed might be counted”; “Look up to the heavens and count the stars, if you can count them … so shall be your seed.”  Is the desert sand and sky empty or full?  We can ask the same question of any dry patch in our own lives and journeys.  In Abraham’s life, God’s voice becomes more than the desert wind but grows a body.  He visits Abraham in the form of three men who lunch with him under the terebinths of Mamre, and they announce the good news of Isaac’s conception.  Abraham knows these men are from God, and they intervene to change the couple’s ideas about what is possible for them.  Sarai (inside the tent) laughs when she hears the news, thinking to herself, “After being shriveled, shall I have pleasure, and my husband is old?”  The men hear this, but instead of repeating Sarai’s exact thoughts, they merely ask Abraham why Sarah doubts that she can conceive when nothing is impossible with God.  In doing so, they gesture to the secret well—Sarai may not be as shriveled as her despair suggests.  Hagar, too, threw down her empty water-skin and cried, thinking her boy would die.  But God opened her eyes to a nearby well.  There is always a well in the desert, but we need the seeing eye God and his songline to lead us to it.  We drink and know that we are forever old and young, barren and fruitful.

In Australia the aboriginal people believe that a songline, also called a dreaming track, is one of the paths across the land which mark the route followed by localized “creator-beings” during the Dreamtime.  The paths of the songlines are recorded in traditional songs, stories, dance, and painting.  And aboriginal people make pilgrimages in which they chant the place names of their songlines as a way of restoring meaning to their lives and of keeping the land alive.  For most of us, sadly, I doubt there is much connection between the place we live and our habit of being in that place.  Our concern is simply to move as quickly (and freely) as possible from one place to another.  We are bereft of rituals of entry that allow us to participate fully in the places we inhabit.  Israel became intimately linked to Canaan (the promised land) through a song, and I believe each of us must approach Flint, for example, through a vision or a song that we find uniquely appropriate to it.  When I met my husband, the head archivist of the Genesee Historical Collections Center, we would take walks through all the gloomiest neighborhoods, and he would tell me nonstop about the buildings and the factories and the railroad lines that were once in the places we traversed.  I will never forget the feeling of walking through time, and I envied his experience of this place as so deeply layered.   

But his song couldn’t work for me, and I didn’t find my Flint song until a group of students and I wrote an adaptation of Shakespeare’s tragedy, King Lear, to Flint; and now I will forever connect that play with its axial word, “nothing,” to a city where everyone is thrust out of work, out of families, out into a forlorn reality as ostensibly blank as the desert or as barren as the heath.  We can numb ourselves with drugs and habit or we can set out, every day, to see, like the prophets in our religious traditions, whether anything can come from nothing (silences, poverty, nakedness, namelessness), whether it secretes any rare love or resilient truth, or whether there is any virtue or opportunity in a return to ground zero.