Morocco’s Baptism of Solitude
In these times of uncertainty, of information overload, of constant connectivity and shrinking attention span, many speak of the need for a digital detox, a cleanse. Some may find relief in putting away the mobile phone, or forest bathing, or yoga. For me, it’s clear that when you need to empty the cache on your brain’s hard drive, you head to the desert.
“My” desert will always be the south of Morocco, far away enough from the modern world to feel otherworldly, close enough to be attainable from major cities like Fes or Marrakech. But the benefits are a slow burn and getting down to the desert can and should require patience and time. No one has said it better than the poet T.S: Elliot: “It’s not the destination, but the journey, that matters”. The catharsis of the desert is not something one can attain from the quick dopamine hit of a flight or a helicopter transfer. The somewhat arduous task of getting there is precisely the point.
And the Moroccan desert is among the most sublime of all road trips. It’s not just the varied and changing scenery. It’s the human landscape, the culture shaped by the severe forces of nature that have created one of the most inhospitable environments on the planet, and yet cultures have come, gone, and thrived along these ancient routes which now by miracle of technology take not weeks but hours to traverse. I remarked on my last foray down to the desert dunes of Morocco that over the course of several days, I took in crumbling casbah villages, marabouts (holy saint’s tombs) ancient mosques, abandoned synagogues, a library that contains one of the earliest known copies of the Koran written on the skin of a gazelle, all before arriving to a point where the highway literally disappears and the dunes of sand begin, stretching for as far as the eye can see and beyond. The towns, cell towers, and city lights fade and you have no choice but to be in the present moment.
No one I’ve read who has written about the desert, be it clerics, mystics, or idiot savants, has quite summed up its allure as the American writer who lived the last half of his life in Morocco, Paul Bowles. It was Bowles’ words, played out on the silver screen in his best known opus “The Sheltering Sky”, which first impressed the power and mystery of the desert on me and caused me to seek that “baptism of solitude“, that reckoning with a force of nature so powerful and absolute. So friends, I leave you with his words, and a wish that you one day you find that transformative moment only a place like the desert can offer.
“Immediately when you arrive in Sahara, for the first or the tenth time, you notice the stillness. An incredible, absolute silence prevails outside the towns; and within, even in busy places like the markets, there is a hushed quality in the air, as if the quiet were a conscious force which, resenting the intrusion of sound, minimizes and disperses sound straightaway. Then there is the sky, compared to which all other skies seem fainthearted efforts. Solid and luminous, it is always the focal point of the landscape. At sunset, the precise, curved shadow of the earth rises into it swiftly from the horizon, cutting into light section and dark section. When all daylight is gone, and the space is thick with stars, it is still of an intense and burning blue, darkest directly overhead and paling toward the earth, so that the night never really goes dark.
You leave the gate of the fort or town behind, pass the camels lying outside, go up into the dunes, or out onto the hard, stony plain and stand awhile alone. Presently, you will either shiver and hurry back inside the walls, or you will go on standing there and let something very peculiar happen to you, something that everyone who lives there has undergone and which the French call le bapteme de solitude. It is a unique sensation, and it has nothing to do with loneliness, for loneliness presupposes memory. Here in this wholly mineral landscape lighted by stars like flares, even memory disappears…A strange, and by no means pleasant, process of reintergration begins inside you, and you have the choice of fighting against it, and insisting on remaining the person you have always been, or letting it take its course. For no one who has stayed in the Sahara for a while is quite the same as when he came.”
Fancy a tea in the Sahara? Sebastian has the formula. Get in touch, to get planning your next Morocco desert adventure.
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The map below is automatically generated by Google and is not indicative of the opinions or stance of Trufflepig regarding the dispute over the Moroccan/Western Sahara region.
