Praying in Death Valley: A Letter to my Father

Elias Amidon

Elias Amidon is a writer, wilderness guide, and teacher in the Sufi tradition. With Elizabeth Roberts, he runs the Qalandar School in Boulder, Colorado, which offers solo wilderness quests and spiritual retreats in Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, and abroad. Elias is president of the Institute for Deep Ecology and coeditor of the books Earth Prayers, Life Prayers, Prayers for a Thousand Years, and Honoring the Earth.

March 5, 1994

Dear Pop,

I write this from Death Valley in one of the most remote places I’ve ever been, on the fourth day of a solo fast. I feel quite weak, but peaceful. It is so quiet here. Time is nearly still—as still as my breathing. I have very few things with me —a sleeping bag, a tarp, some clothes. There are no distractions.

I think of the luxuriant green of your surroundings, the wind through a million leaves. I hope the hibiscus we planted survive after the cows got at them. I love the image of you chasing them off with a slingshot!

Here the valley and mountains are bare — just scattered creosote bushes on an undulating expanse of rock and sand. As my friend Meredith says, you sit on Grandmother’s bones out here.

My little camp rests between two smooth hills that rise up on either side of me like breasts — I’m in the bosom of the earth. As I look up from this page, I see for miles across Death Valley to the Last Chance Mountains. This area is full of portentous names ...

Why do I do this? Certainly not because it's fun (it isn’t), though tomorrow, when I hike out of here, will be wonderful and joyous. The thought of a piece of good bread, or a strawberry! No, I do this for some reason that remains half-hidden from me, that keeps surprising me. I do it to burn up the dross that collects in my soul. I do it to burn up my forgetfulness and sloppy ways of living. I do it to remember simple gratitude. The ordeal of going without food or companionship or things to do is a surprisingly hard teacher — and an honest one.

I’ve been praying a lot out here. “Praying!?” I hear you say. I can imagine the idea of prayer may strike your Unitarian soul as superstitious or sentimental. And it’s true, superstition and sentimentality are demons in the spiritual heart—I do my best to keep vigilant. Out here in this Big Quiet I rise in the first light before dawn and climb to the top of one of these hills where I can see for miles and miles. I do the ISame at sunset. And there I sing my prayers for a long time as the sun slowly rises or sets. I pray for the well-being of everybody and everything that I can think of. I pray that your days will be many and filled with love, that your heart will be open and your mind free and your body strong. Simple things. I pray that all those who suffer will find peace and be comforted, that all those with vicious intent will be blessed with mercy, that all the hands about to commit violence toward another will be stayed. I pray for all my loved ones and family and friends. I pray that my life will be an offering to grace the beauly of the world.

And to whom do I pray? Who listens? No one. The God I pray to is unknown to me. I know that any conception I have of God is not God. Of course I address this unknown God with many names: Ob Gracious OneI Oh Spirit of Ml! Oh Earth beneath my feet! Oh Loving Sun! Oh Moon and Mountain and Water of Life! Oh sweet Spirit of the Air! Oh you billion stars! Oh AIL Those who have come before me! Oh Generous Heart that beats through the world in ways known and unknown! Oh Great Mystery! and many more ...

These names of the Nameless open up the ground I stand on and the air I breathe and the light we all share, and suddenly Everything is Listening! Rock, lizard, crow, cloud—everything listens! I feel as if I partake in the Great Kindness of the universe — my prayers me. lt me into that.

Do you remember what Einstein asked, what he Called the most fundamental question: “Is the universe benign?” I agree that the question is fundamental, but the answer is easy. To me the universe is so obviously "good”—though ruthless and indifferent at the same time. I believe that what we have emerged from, and what we will return to, is the indescribable essence of Blessing. This is not to say that I can turn away from or trivialize the world’s suffering—whoever does that trivializes themselves —but even in the face of suffering, even in the midst of my own, a kind of Unfathomable Tenderness holds us, an Unbounded Grace —although these words — Tenderness and Grace — are only distant approximations of what is.

How did such an old humanist/atheist like you spawn such a wide- eyed pantheist like me? Actually, I suspect beneath the exteriors you’re a wide-eyed pantheist yourself. Maybe come Judgment Day we all will be.

I came upon the remains of a wild burro down in the wash the other day. Mostly bones — she had been picked pretty clean. Her skull was grinning, as all skulls do. What’s the joke I wonder? Somebody once told me that at the very moment of our death we wake up laughing. That old burro did.

Just before I started this letter I was sitting here gazing out at the Quiet and you came to my mind. I thought of your eighty-two years and that very likely, though not for sure, you will die before me, and suddenly 1 was filled with a great pang of missing you. I haven’t written anything since I’ve been out here—it’s too distracting—but that pang made me get out my pen and paper. The idea of a world without you in it makes me lonely, though who knows, you might be dead even as I write this, or I might be as you read this. We live mostly in an illusion of our own projection. And maybe that is the magic of prayer and its power: It calls us to dive deep into what matters most to us, to find it, acknowledge it, and bring it up into the air. That’s why singing my prayers aloud in my singsong chanting way up on this hill with no one listening fills me with such love and gratefulness. An illusion of my own projection, which becomes truth. Like existence itself bursting out of emptiness, we mimic that incomprehensible act in our own little ways.

But what do you think? Is there a purpose or a meaning to all of this, or is it senseless? I wonder if the answer might be neither, or someplace between meaning and meaninglessness. It’s like that beautiful painting you did years ago of a hand lifted up and open to the cosmos —all we have is the gesture. Meaning falls away, and meaninglessness falls away, in the beauty and thoroughness of each momentary gesture. And that’s how I believe in prayer—it’s a gesture, an offering flung up into the wind and blown away, an act of creation with no grasping for the results. “So be it!” I sing, “So be it! Oh bless them and heal them and love them and make the way open before them in beauty! So be it!” And then? Only the Quiet remains, taking the prayers within it like invisible seeds, and I am left not quite who I was, no different from anything else, though so very me.

My subjectivity loses its edges out here. I remember reading somewhere that Jacob Boehme said, “Whatever the self describes, describes the self.” And so this projection, this gesture of prayer, describes us. It is a chance to unfold ourselves through what matters most to us—like great music and art and dance and poetry. But then, all of our gestures carry the potential of prayer within them—a handshake, a kiss, making a meed, making love, wishing each other good morning, good night, have a nice day, be well! Prayers to the heart we share, and the Silence that holds us

so tenderly. And yet, for all this high-minded talk of prayer, it’s really not so special—in fact, it’s quite ordinary. It’s simply what we give. Prayer is what we give. We give thanks, we give love, we give support, we give respect, we give solace, we give compassion. Prayer is our gift back.

Well, maybe that’s not always true—there are the prayers I sing for myself and those are gifts to myself “Oh Dear heart, bless me with strength and responsiveness, free me from self-pity, teach me graciousness when I am self- centered, make of my life an offering....” But look, there it is again, the gifting. We seek to rise above our heaviness and self-preoccupation. Why? To give and live more authentically, to love each other beyond conditions.

That’s why I come out here, and why I guide others to come, because in some mysterious way it completes the circle, allowing me to touch without distraction all that I care for and value, and to offer my life to that.

Of course it’s also uncomfortable, and boring, and lonely—the wind blows incessantly or it rains for days or you can’t keep your mind off food— but in the end you know it is the ordeal itself that transforms you. Strange, isn’t it? Tomorrow, when I’m finally back in the world of towns and traffic, I’m going to find a strawberry and eat it slowly—and may I never again forget the blessing of that taste!

Well, I hope all this talk of prayer hasn’t put you off. The demon of sentimentally lives off words — so often when we try to express the Ineffable it turns into pap. That’s why I love singing my prayers all alone out here—the words matter so much less than the spirit they carry. Writing them down like this is much more treacherous. Perhaps a higher way would be to learn how to pray without words. Can we do that?

In the end I think prayer simply calls from us our deepest sincerity about what we love. When it does that, it escapes superstition and sentimentality and heals our isolation.

In this spirit I pray your days will be gentle and fulfilling and your nights full of peace.

... but now the wind is up, blowing sand in my face, telling me Enough Words! So may the Silence bless you.

Love,

Elias