Desert

In the Style of the Desert Fathers — 4th Century CE Egypt

The city feeds you with the bread of others' expectations. The desert feeds you with the bread of your own hunger. Here, where nothing grows easily, everything that grows grows true. The emptiness is not empty— it is full of what you brought with you and could never see in the noise of plenty. Blessed is the soul that discovers: what I thought was absence was the deepest presence, what I feared as barrenness was the richest soil, what I fled as death was the only life I had not yet dared to live.