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| Writing Studio, Death Valley, Steve Brown 2026 |
1.
Furnace Creek Campground, 5:02 a.m.
I woke up at 4:45 and many times before that. Somehow, I still managed to get six hours of sleep. Outside the tent, I head over to the restroom in the soft shades of gray. Camping turns the smallest necessity into ritual. Everything becomes significant. The short path to the restroom runs between two clusters of struggling mesquite trees that standout significantly even in the low light because of the chalky soil. You know shade is needed badly when the park service purposefully locates a campground in a wash. Yesterday afternoon I came to love these broad, low trees as they blocked the day's most intense rays.
However, this morning it is slightly chilly even with my hoodie. These tree-heaps that grow like clumps of prairie grass bent over after rain are pleasant to look upon in the low light. After just one night, I am already at home in this place. I'm not sure why but nowhere touches my soul like here. I can't imagine my life without these few short visits to this valley. It's strange, but it almost feels like I came into this world for these exact moments. Perhaps that is why, even with global warming, some travel is good. How do you find your place in the world if you never leave home? Staying put is good most the time. You can find beauty absolutely anywhere. Every neighborhood is a visual paradise with the right eyes. Yet, I absolutely know my life would not be the same if I never came to Death Valley. It is my place. Mine. I have no clue why. Our souls know more than we do. But now that I've been here, it is deep within me, always. Part of me wonders if this place was intrinsic to me even before my first breath. Maybe we each select our journey through this life before we are born.
Big Bend has a similar hold on me as does Canyon de Chelly. Although not quite as strong here, there is a view near the mouth of Santa Elena Canyon in Big Bend that upon my first arrival I swore I'd seen it before. My brother, more scientifically minded than myself, has tried to convince me many times that I probably saw it in a photograph when I was very young. But I don't believe that is the source of my connection. The Deja vu was so intense. I don't know why I knew that place before I saw it, but I know I did. Though fuzzy around the edges, that distant meeting with those cliffs is as real as the pressure under my fingertips as I type this sentence. There are connections the conscious mind can't make that are real indeed. That doesn't mean nothing is solid, measurable, or quantifiable. It just means our lenses are limited. There's real, and then there's the bedrock beneath real. Santa Elena Canyon, Death Valley, and Canyon del Muerto set off sparks and ignite some part of me I know but don't know, understand but don't understand.
Canyon del Muerto in Canyon de Chelly National Monument might be explainable spiritually. In Marci's family it is said that when Kit Carson's army burned up the dwellings and orchards in the Chinle Valley, and her ancestors fled into the canyon for safety, Marci's great-great grandmother was hidden in a tree as a baby for safe keeping and survived several days until she could be retrieved. If that hadn't happened, Marci wouldn't be here today. It makes sense to me that if that oral story is true that I might have witnessed it myself previous to my birth given how important Marci is to me now. My brother, of course, also points out we visited Canyon de Chelly when I was five, and I might remember it from then. I probably do. But I don't think that alone would give me such a strong feeling of connection.
It is significant to me that the three natural holy places I've encountered in my life so far are places of exposed rock. I love the bones of the earth. Deserts reveal much to me. I can't fathom getting through this life without spending a night at Furnace Creek campground. I was born to be here and write this paragraph. This is more real than any job I've had even though I love teaching. How often do we spend our time focused on what our soul knows we were meant to do? I have come to believe we all came here with set agendas, and that we often when we feel lost and disconnected it is because we are spending our time doing everything else except what matters most to us. I intend to spend less and less time away from who I am.
And so, I'm headed off to Zabriskie Point to watch the sun rise.
2. Furnace Creek Campground, 7:03 a.m.
It was a slow, magnificent unveiling of the valley with light and color moving down the mountains, across the valley, and finally to the badlands that are Zabriskie Point. The wind was cold and brutal, but it was well worth it.
Here at camp, the sun is already warm enough that I have taken off my sweater to feel the warm rays directly on my skin. It's wonderful, but as it is only a little after seven and already 59 degrees, it will be a warm one. 81 is the forecasted high today and 86 tomorrow.
I will have to drive to Beaty today to buy some shorts as I left my suitcase with all my clothes at home, and all I have to wear are long, black pants, which are not ideal for here, the hottest place on earth.
3. Roadside, 7:44 a.m.
I sit in a fold out chair at the north end of the salt flat. Except when a car passes, which is seldom, there is no sound. If I were farther from the road there would be nothing auditory, absolutely nothing.
Beyond the gravel of the highway, there are chunky baseball-sized rocks of various colors--orange, green, white, blue--pastel-grayed versions of those hues, but still not colors you associate with stone. They are normalized a little by the scattered salt brush and thin, yellow blooming weeds. Then, beyond that is the bright white flat, and farther back, the red and gray basalt mountains.
This to me is life. Everything else is just a means to get to moments like this. A gentle breeze, almost no thought, and timeless space.
I'm startled by a fly-buzz. Even that is noisy here.
I fold up my chair, my movable writing studio, and get back in the car. When I get home and write this thing out, pacing will be important to capture time, place and space. A vehicle covers so much distance in not much time. It blurs together what should be separated and unique. Landscapes change quickly in the 21st century because we no longer move at natural speeds. A good book could capture that speed. Another good book could capture the space between things.
More and more in this life I am looking for the space between. I think my brother Lloyd has always done that. When we were kids, I would often catch him staring into space, and I would ask him what he was doing, and he wouldn't be able to tell me because on some level he had vanished into a moment. That is now my goal in life, to vanish into moments, to savor details, to slow down time by focusing on light and textures, to be rather than do. The doing is inevitable anyway. We think. We move. We do. We are distracted, pushed always to accomplish something. And that's okay. I'm not trying to slip out of life or responsibility. I'm just trying to slow down enough to notice I'm actually living. It seems absurd, but most of the time we're so caught up in the world inside our head, always worrying about the next item on the to-do list, that we actually seldom savor what it means to be alive.
Even here, one of the quietest, least inhabited places on earth by plants or animals, a fly buzzes by. And what I do here is no more or less significant that what he or she does. We are objects in space and together we are experiencing sunlight and sound together, separated by our own senses, yet living this moment as one. The fly could drop dead. I could drop dead. The valley would remain unchanged. But at this instant simply because we are here, we are part of it.
That realization, whenever and wherever I have it--to me that is what living is all about. The other stuff is good. Nothing wrong with a good bowl of cereal in cold milk. Nice, warm socks on a cold morning feel great. Careers, a little extra money to buy good things or go cool places. Those are all awesome. But for some reason that isn't life to me. It's extra. Only friends and loved ones match the importance of now.
This is real: Connecting to a fly. Silence. No-thought. Just being. That's where I truly live.
We spend so much time hung up in the notes of life that we don't notice that the real music is in the space between the sounds, and that notes just provide boundaries so that for a minute we can slip into the infinite. All those daily tasks are not the point of living. They just frame infinity into digestible bits for mankind. But if you're not noticing the objects on your desk in sunlight while wading through that stack of papers, you're missing out on a lot of what life has to offer. And that has nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with accomplishing anything today. In terms of happiness, the real accomplishment may just be slowing down enough to notice the space between the accomplishments.
Once we find grace in the void, we begin to encounter grace in everything. All glitters God.
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