I need to write and insert a memory at this point.\u00a0 I have tried to capture an experience in words, a profound experience which is receding with time.\u00a0 I wish to revisit it, to call it up, relive my night in the White Desert of Egypt in February 2009.<\/p>\n
I am adjusting to the diminishing light as twilight lowers like a soft diaphanous fabric cloaking everything around me.\u00a0 Before things disappear completely, I need to find the place, \u2018my place\u2019 in this vast White Desert stretching out from me in all directions.\u00a0 At the moment these amazing, wind-chiseled rocks of astounding shapes and size are the only sentinels in the empty landscape, becoming silhouetted as the lilac gauze gets denser and covers them up, one by one.<\/p>\n
I am looking for the place, \u2018my place\u2019, where I will roll out my sleeping bag and look up at the sky, at the heavens doming the White Desert of Egypt.\u00a0 And the Black Desert, but that\u2019s further away.\u00a0 The space I select while I can still make out form is away from the group \u2013\u00a0 their voices have become fainter and I feel solitude creeping up around me.\u00a0 My bed is fairly close to a rock formation gently sloping up as a mound behind me, providing a little protection from a slight wind, a chilly wind, which has just come up as the sky turns from the lilac gold of sunset into a more charcoal hue.<\/p>\n
I roll out my bed.\u00a0 I had been pleased to find an \u2018ultra-lite\u2019 sleeping bag, weighing 470 grams and fitting into a small pouch.\u00a0 Fully clothed, I ease myself into its larger pouch, pulling the zip up under my chin.\u00a0 There is a slight extension, not really a hood but I can tighten it around my head.\u00a0 I soon realise that my ultra-lite is not exactly ultra-warm.\u00a0 I feel my body mould itself into the very fine luminous white sand, formed by the weathering of these stone giants all around me.<\/p>\n
As I\u2019d walked through the desert this afternoon I\u2019d had a sense of timelessness.\u00a0 This had once been the bottom of an ocean and there were fossils embedded in the rocks and stones.\u00a0 The sand was like a pristine beach, an ocean bed from aeons ago.\u00a0 And now I am connected to this ocean bed all along my spine, my pelvis pushing down into it, my calf muscles moulding themselves into the sand beneath me through the thin padding of my sleeping bag.<\/p>\n
I look up finally and gasp at the dome above, pressing down on me with the weight of the stars studding its sphere in layers. Stars, \u201cpacked and stacked\u201d I think it is Laurens van der Post who refers to African stars like this.\u00a0 These heavens are loaded, bursting like a giant pomegranate.\u00a0 For a while, my attention is so fixed on the immensity of the vista above that I am almost out of my body, truly mesmerised as each layer of new stars seems to be switched on.\u00a0 It is a progression \u2013 they don\u2019t all come on at once ! There is an order in this cosmic choreography.\u00a0 A host of clich\u00e9s tumble out to describe what I am witness to.<\/p>\n
But slowly, I return to the rest of my bodily senses.\u00a0 My physicality.\u00a0 My numbness.\u00a0 I am most aware of the interface at the surface of my skin, the small exposed area around my cheeks, chin, nose and small strip of forehead above my eyebrows under my woolen cap.\u00a0 This surface is where the heat in my body is spiraling up from its core and meeting the creeping cold emanating from out of the rocks and moving across the sand.\u00a0 It feels like an icy cold breath, blowing gently on my face and turning the liquid in my nostrils into small icicles.\u00a0 Breathing in too deeply, I feel my lungs resist the cold intrusion into my interior.<\/p>\n
Yes, I am cold.\u00a0 And I know that I will not find sleep this night.\u00a0 I surrender to this knowing and look up, my eyes smarting with droplets of tears building up at their corners.\u00a0 I know too that trying to sleep would be a wasted opportunity, a squandering of this gift. I will probably not have another night under the Egyptian White Desert sky.\u00a0 This is the moment, the eternal Now.\u00a0 I relax into the experience and gaze upward awed.<\/p>\n
The hours of looking upward passed one by one as I entered an \u2018altered state\u2019 \u2013 \u00a0not asleep but neither present in my body except in its deep interior, which mirrors what I was witnessing through my eyes as gateways. The phrase \u201ceyes, as gateways to the soul\u201d,\u00a0 takes on meaning.\u00a0 Looking back now, I was feasting on cosmic bounty, those stars pouring down, nourishing my soul, still struggling in early 2009 to enter my body, find a perch and anchor.\u00a0 That night was a big step in my process.<\/p>\n
At some point I had a sense that the spectacle was drawing to a close.\u00a0 There was a very subtle change in the heavens.\u00a0 At first I was unsure and blinked, thinking it was my vision. But, no, it was as I thought.\u00a0 A number of stars had just disappeared.\u00a0 And as I watched, and focused my attention, an entire plethora of stars simply disappeared\u00a0 \u2013 faded out.\u00a0 I had the image of a veil holding them, being drawn aside.\u00a0 Riveted, I watched as a series of disappearing layers were repeated simultaneously with the lightening of the sky. The dark dense space holding\u00a0 the \u2018seven veils\u2019 was gone.<\/p>\n
The final veil, a flimsy gauze of soft lilac holding the few remaining stars, was still present as the huge red sun began to express itself along the horizon.\u00a0 The shimmering, luminous sand stretched out between me, solidified and numb in my sleeping bag, and the promise of warmth in the rosy distance.<\/p>\n
This is the memory I wish to hold.<\/p>\n
As the sunrise took shape, I joined a few friends on a rock to stand with our faces in the sunlight, to greet the desert dawn and hold a short meditation for J, my new friend in Cape Town who was about to enter surgery.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A beautiful memory of a night under the Egyptian desert skies on my second visit to Egypt in early 2009.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":494,"template":"","categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-492","episode_posts","type-episode_posts","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-part-3-you-yourself-are-the-melody"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mylisteningheart.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/episode_posts\/492","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mylisteningheart.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/episode_posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mylisteningheart.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/episode_posts"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mylisteningheart.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/494"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mylisteningheart.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=492"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mylisteningheart.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=492"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mylisteningheart.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=492"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}