I crept up slowly with the pre-dawn darkness, the stars still blazing against the darkness of 4am, no expectancy of any light to come.
We took our blankets and trudged, barefoot, up sliding sand dunes to plop down facing East. Feeling like the only people awake on Earth. Unlit lanterns and a water bottle of Holy Water from the only Muslim mosque with a bell.
The Sahara in Senegal. Three sips of Holy Water.
Three sips, the first for forgiveness.
For every person who’s pierced me and I ask for forgiveness for every person I’ve pierced. Relief washes the hardened edges of my heart as I curl into the sand, fetal position, burying my feet and borrowing my head, the sand cradling the curves of my body and I feel as though I’ve returned to the womb. I forgive my mother. I forgive myself. I forgive myself.
Three sips, the second for strength.
Blue african agate on fine sand, my fingers dig through generations of erosion, the microcosm of the macrocosm, the power of wind, a force we can’t see. The alchemical compression of minerals deep within the Earth, the birth of the string of beads resting around my neck, connecting my heartbeat to Earth’s.
I’ve become a sand dune, my surface keeping secrets from the wind which lifts my own thoughts and carries them over the vast desert dunes.
Three sips, the third for compassion.
Compassion warms my body like mother’s milk, liquid gold spilling from the slow rising sun. Compassion comes with dawn, with silence, with the slipping away of stars to replace the blazing of the sun. Compassion comes with sharing stillness with the others beside me, hearts in human bodies wrapped up in patterned blankets drinking in the moment with awe. I can only hear my heartbeat.
The wind over the dunes sounds like the roaring of the ocean in a shell, like the rhythmic beating of last night’s drums, feet pounding an ecstatic dance under a Pisces moon. It was wild, it was ritual, it was the same desert wind that lifted our scarves and our spirits to move in tune with our hearts, in tune with each other, and in tune with ourselves.
