There was a time when I could no longer bear the weight of my own life after the death of
my first husband. So I married another man who took me to the Arabian Peninsula.
The Arabs in their hospitality and impeccable manners seemed grounded in a spiritual
orderliness I was starved for. The desert emerged as a gateway to some kind of flowing presence
resonating with my interior. As a young widow, I’d become confused and any future mark I’d
envisioned for my life had dissolved.
More than twenty-six years later, the inner forces that conspired to send me to the desert
are no longer unknown to me.
I’d like to pretend I’d made an empowered decision to uproot myself from everything I’d
known.
I’d like to tell you the man I married three years after my first husband’s death instilled me
with hope for a new kind of future