As I write this weekly blog post, I am especially conscious of today’s date: February 14th. I was aware of it in my blog post last year, too. I had just come back from an interfaith conference at Yale with two friends. We had barely returned to Boston by train when a snowstorm paralyzed Boston’s subway system the next day. This year, the weather hasn’t warmed up to Boston that much. The blistering wind and sub-zero temperatures in Boston notwithstanding, I’d like to talk about a subject that is very warm, bright, and easy to get lost in. It is something that at least a few of us have ventured through at least once during our lives. I’m referring, of course, to deserts.
Okay, maybe that wasn’t the first subject that came to mind, but bear with me. When I hear the word desert, I think of a lifeless, barren, vast landscape filled with sand and rocks. I picture dryness and heat so overpowering that it feels almost impossible to continue walking. The desert to me is a place of trial, of wandering, of desolation. Many of us have entered a place like at some point in our lives, even if we have never physically traveled to a desert. One does not have to wander and fast for forty days in a desert to understand what it feels like to be in rough place for a long period of time.
This image of deserts reminds me of a book by Madeleine L’Engle that I read a long time ago, called Many Waters, part of the A Wrinkle in Time series. The protagonists are two brothers, Sandy and Dennys, who travel to a desert set in the time before the flood in Genesis. There, they meet Noah’s family and the seraphim, winged creatures that live with humans in the guise of animals. The plot of the book revolves around the two trying to return to the present before many waters drown all the people living in the desert. Besides the numerous biblical allusions to Noah’s ark and the story of the flood, there was one line at the end that stood out to me most vividly: “Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it.” This line comes from the Song of Solomon, one of the books from the Old Testament. This was the first time I had associated love with the image of deserts.
The second time came several years later, in a French course that I took during junior year of high school. We were reading Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Le Petit Prince (The Little Prince). In that book, the author recounts a story where he meets a young boy from another planet after crashing his plane in the desert. The young boy tells him stories of the planets that he’s visited, the people he’s encountered, and the creatures he’s met as the two travel through the desert. The two are searching for water in the desert while suffering from thirst, when at one point the boy makes two remarks. In French, they are:
“-L’eau put aussi être bon pour le coeur…”
“-Ce qui embellit le désert, dit le petit prince, c’est qu’il cache un puits quelque part…”
Translated, they read:
“Water could also be good for the heart…”
” ‘What makes the desert beautiful,’ said the little prince, ‘is that there’s a well hiding somewhere…’ ”
My French teacher asked us to replace the references to water with the word “love.” When we did that, these two comments took on a slightly different meaning.
Love, for all of its vastness and varying definitions, is something that many of us seek when we are experiencing hardship. During the times when we are wandering through a desert, it can be incredibly difficult to see. But no matter how hard it may be to see, we can always find it. We find it in ourselves, in our friends, in our family, and in those around us. That is something that no desert can parch, nor can any flood drown.