“Lost” in the desert

Written in the desert house, April 2026

I’ve lost days. I looked at the map, maybe it was in Italian, and now I’ve confused when is when. I’m losing needing to know. I am so outside of time. It is measured in wind bursts, sunsets, loved ones’ days off and their increased presence. I sat down to breakfast today at the camp and the Spanish ladies next to me asked me if I’m alone. It’s no longer noticeable to me…this aloneness. I just am here with myself. But there are clues we read: we’re out here in the middle of nowhere and there is only one place setting for breakfast, so I must be alone. We bump up against people and that tells us about ourselves. Informs us. What we push against. But what do we push against when there is no one to see us? When we are alone? With just ourselves. Do we become more ourselves, with no one telling us what we are? But don’t we learn some of that by what we are not? How we are in relation to others? I’ve really enjoyed this time full of huge, expansive skies, no one to bump against. My inner world as expansive as the horizon around me. Also, I feel a little untethered. A little wandering, I’m becoming a little unhinged. I’m losing words. And social norms.

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the novels I’ve read about women who were kidnapped by Native Americans. How when given the chance to return to their previous culture, they didn’t want to be “rescued.” How they adapted and lost who they were so that they couldn’t go back again. Couldn’t imagine returning. That is how I am feeling here, I don’t ever want to leave this place. This slowness. This presence. This attention to the world around me. This porch sitting and learning the habits of the birds, watching the bugs scurry, and tracking the walking dance of the dunes.

I’m sitting here in the restaurant, writing and enjoying the Hindi at the table down the way and the Spanish next to me and realizing how it’s actually easier sometimes to write like this….like how I wrote tombs at Café des Espices in the middle of the Marrakech souks last summer surrounded by chatter…easier to be alone and present with yourself when you’re having to consciously focus on it. And I’m just now reminded of my mother’s huge fear of being alone and how I was so determined not to fear the same thing. How I tried to cultivate armor against it by meeting it head on. And maybe there is something to be scared of…the aloneness that comes when you’re surrounded by people and yet still on your own island. That, to me, is the loneliness to fear. Right now, I’ve worked so hard to be this alone. To be on my own island. But it is a choice…to meet myself here. To give time and space for the depths to appear.

Different from the aching loneliness that comes from not being seen.

I feel less alone here than I have in so many areas of my life.

 Maybe feeling alone is born from a lack of connection to yourself. Needing others to see us, and having them not, is particularly painful. Like in a marriage. Slowly I’m learning that if you are home in yourself, if you can hold your own loneliness, if you can take responsibility for your own ever-changing inner landscapes…you are never alone.

While I may not feel alone, I have a slightly nagging feeling that I am lost. Who comes to the desert. Alone. And wanders around and stares at birds and watches camels? For weeks on end. I’m slightly comforted by the idea that Georgia O’Keefe had a house in the middle of the desert in New Mexico and did exactly this.

 I’ve been painting and writing and unwinding. I imagine that, in relation to anyone living a more ordinary life, I’ve become a little unhinged. Lost in the desert. Lost from normal life. Lost from the path we’ve been told to follow. I ordered a book on Georgia and shipped it to my mother’s house. It is waiting for me there, and I find that oddly reassuring. I know I’m not lost; I’m following my intuition. I am doing what I want and it’s clear. I think it’s a feeling of losing my previous selves.

I know I can’t go back…. though I’m not entirely sure what “back” even means anymore. To whom I was before. To where I’ve been. But isn’t this true for anyone going through life? We can’t go backwards. But this feels more monumental than simply going with the flow of life. I have completely stepped out of my life. Off my path. I saw it stretching out in front of me. I could see the bends and the turns and could not take one more step on that path. So here I am, wandering the desert, talking to birds, and finding another way forward. Rewriting what it means to be me. Maybe sometimes we have to get lost before we can stop becoming who everyone expected us to be. Or maybe we were never lost to begin with. We were just bumping up against places that weren’t ours.