The Desert That Spoke My Name
I went to the Arizona desert to lose myself. I had planned the trip for months—a solo journey to “find clarity.” What I really wanted was to escape: from a job that drained me, a relationship that had ended, and the constant noise of a city that never slept.
The first thing that struck me was the silence.
It wasn’t the absence of sound, but the presence of a different kind of music. The wind hummed as it swept across the red rocks. A lone hawk cried somewhere in the vast, open sky. My own heartbeat, usually drowned out by subway trains and phone notifications, became the drum I walked to.
I arrived at Antelope Canyon just as the afternoon sun positioned itself perfectly overhead. As I descended into the narrow sandstone passageway, the world above disappeared.
Then, the light show began.
Sunbeams, sharp and divine, sliced through cracks in the canyon ceiling. They illuminated the swirling, wave-like walls in shades of orange, purple, and gold. It was like walking inside a cathedral built by time itself. In that moment, surrounded by ancient stone that had been carved by nothing but water and patience, my problems felt both incredibly small and profoundly significant.
I wasn’t just a heartbroken, burned-out office worker anymore. I was a speck in a timeline millions of years long, standing in a place of impossible beauty. The canyon didn’t care about my failed presentation or my broken heart. It just was. And in its majestic presence, I remembered how to just be, too.
That evening, I sat on a rock watching the sunset paint the sky in fiery hues. I opened my journal, the one I’d brought to obsessively analyze my life, and instead of writing about my problems, I sketched the light in the canyon. I wrote about the taste of dust in the air and the feeling of the warm rock beneath my hand.
I didn’t find all the answers in the desert. But I found the right question. It wasn’t “What am I doing with my life?” but rather…
“Am I truly alive in this moment?”
The desert gave me back a piece of myself I had forgotten: the part that could be still, that could wonder, and that understood that sometimes, the most profound journeys aren’t about the miles you travel on a map, but the distance you cover within your own soul.
I went to the desert to lose myself. And I did. I lost the anxious, hurried version of me. And the person who began the long drive home… she was someone new.
