At some point in my mid-forties, I realized many of my beloved movies have sand in them: Lawrence of Arabia, The English Patient, Woman in the Dunes, South Pacific. They have grandeur and metaphoric sweep. Sand—granular matter with spiritual heft—sets a stage for change, eternity, arcs of plot-driven pleasure and tragedy. It is a context for immeasurable struggle in relationships between people and environments. From inner and outer conflicts emerge deep insights and unresolved paradoxes. Sand of course has many origins and natures; much is formed from silicon dioxide, but the island sand of South Pacific, which was filmed partly in Kauai, is mostly shell and remnants of sea creatures. Elsewhere, sand is ground up quartz, feldspar, mica. When my husband and I returned from Libya, I researched the dunes we had climbed. Sand in some great deserts is often not very deep; its depth varies vastly in the Sahara. When I was overwhelmed as a young mother, the unstoppable sand of Woman in the Dunes seemed a perfect figure for the relentlessness of the quotidian from which the main character—and perhaps humans in general—will not escape.
2
As a child in the Sonoran desert, I played with my brothers in the sand-filled arroyo in back of our suburban home; there we hunted for “sand rubies,” tiny garnets that washed in with iron deposits during the monsoons. The dazzling beauty of the desert hovered close by. After a summer monsoon rain brought about by the cumulonimbus clouds that seemed to walk on giant gray legs from the gulf of California, we would take our magnets and our Mason jars down the creosote and mesquite-lined side of the “ditch,” as we called our arroyo, and drag the magnets through to attract the iron that clung to the “rubies.” Holding the magnet in the jar, we would shake the three elements—sand, iron, garnets—into the jar. My brothers were good at quantity and I went for quality. Back in the house, under the purr of the 1950s swamp cooler, I would spread our findings on the Arizona Daily Star and take my mother’s eyebrow tweezers to the little piles of minerals, retrieving the faceted garnets.
3
In “Desert Places,” Robert Frost writes of the spiritual loneliness of a snowy winter moment, and beyond that, to an existential terror of nothingness; he ends his piece with a desert put-down: “They cannot scare me with their empty spaces/Between stars—on stars where no human race is./I have it in me so much nearer home/To scare myself with my own desert places.” I resent the term “spiritual desert.” Nothing is fuller and more satisfying than a desert. Otherwise, why did so many of the world’s religions begin in deserts, as well as the turning points for those philosophies—Jesus’ forty days in the wilderness. Desert, from deserere: to abandon or forsake. In the breathless beauty of arid environments, internal voices and archetypal presences are telescoped. Yet it’s impossible to make the case to some. Some well-known East Coast poets conversed in my car outside Tucson: “It doesn’t appeal to me,” one said. “Why not?” I asked (having already decided he had a spiritual defect). “There’s nothing there,” he replied. We looked out at miles of muted sage green and sister-of-gray verdure—ocotillo, saguaro, prickly pear, cholla, mesquite, blue palo verde where thousands of species lived in burrows, under rocks, in cleverly made nests. Cactus wrens, tortoises, coyotes, tarantulas—really, a very lively “nothing.” As desert children my brothers and I learned the value of precious water when our mother saved it in shallow pans for the desert creatures and plants. I was drawn to poetry in part from the idea of a gnostic “flow” of internal water in the cactus, its magical self-containment. In our arroyo, the Gila monster and mourning dove got by on very little water, and outside the city limits, indigenous communities engaged in dry-land agriculture, using and re-using moisture that came from the annual rainfall, conserving carefully to preserve underground supplies.
4
My husband and I stood with a few other poets at the edge of Creech Air Force Base in the Las Vegas desert, protesting drone warfare. The striated colors in the distance, delicate strips of orange, pink, peach, brown, beige. The eyeless drones scooped down over us, checking us out. We read poetry and visited a temple of Sekhmet nearby, where minuscule golden fish swim in a secret wellspring pond. A species of the Amargosa pupfish is found only in underground streams of the Mojave desert.
5
In his long poem “Sand Shadows,” Libyan poet Ashur Etwebi writes: “Are those houses a mirage of water or Bedouins hiding from old winds?/The sand won’t speak about it/nor can the foxes that stood on the hill for centuries follow their trails.” Visting Libya, we stood in the Sahara in a sandstorm. Sand had blown all night, under the doors, into the cracks of our small room. The next day, I ran up a high dune as wind blew with unfathomable ferocity. It was the most relentless thing I had ever experienced physically, outside childbirth. Sand in the eyes, nose, hair, soul. The origin of Saharan sand is unknown. At the top of the dune, I had lost my friends the poets down below the sand cloud, had never been so happy and had no idea why. Later, I recalled lines from the movie Lawrence of Arabia (Jackson Bentley: What attracts you personally to the desert? T. E. Lawrence: It’s clean).
6
When we received my father’s ashes back from the crematorium, I took out a couple handfuls and put them in a baggie separate from the rest of his ashes that would be taken to the Episcopal cemetery and placed into the desert ground. Before the funeral, my brothers and I went out in back of our family home and took our small handfuls of ashes to the arroyo where we had spent so many pleasurable hours as children. The ash gently settled down in the desert sand, some of the light gray shapes landing in the thorny thicket lining the side, with the doves’ five-note song over them.
Brenda Hillman, a poet, educator, editor, and activist, is the author of ten poetry collections, most recently Extra Hidden Life, Among the Days.
