There's something about Morocco that stays inside some people.
"It gets under your skin and stays there," I observed to my friend who has lived in Marrakech for four years now.
"You love Morocco," my former tutoring student informed me when I visited her and her family in Casablanca.
"So, you are addicted to Morocco?" the border control officer asked me while studying my passport's many Moroccan entry stamps.
All true observations. Of course, the same could be said for any country, I believe, including my own. There's a beauty in loving two places at the same time. In leaving my home and then turning around to look at it from a distance.
I have found the principle to be true for other types of homes.
My guide and I sat under a palm tree in the desert and ate a picnic lunch on the second to last day of my tour.
"I used to think the Sahara desert was just sand dunes," I confessed. He grinned in response.
"No, it is not just sand dunes. There are many different types of desert."
He should know. He grew up in Merzouga, the last village before the roads end and the dunes begin.
He told me that hundreds of millions of years ago, the Sahara lay at the bottom of an ocean. That's why there are so many fossils of shark teeth, fish, and ammonites for sale on the side of the roads and highways in this region of Morocco.
"The tourists, some of them come to study geology, fossils...they are searching for sea creatures in the desert."
I stared at the bone dry landscape around me, imagining the mountains just barely keeping their peaks above the waves in a primeval hurricane.
There's a common setting in the Abrahamic religions: the desert, or "the wilderness" if you want to get poetic about it. Abraham's slave Hagar ran away from her abusive enslavers and encountered God there, in the desert, on two separate occasions. Abraham's descendant Jacob wrestled with the Angel of God there, in the desert, and earned the new name Israel for his persistence. Israel's descendants were famously sentenced to wander there, in the desert, for 40 years after their escape from slavery in Egypt.
In the Christian Scriptures, John the Baptist lived in the desert, away from the noise and temptations of the cities. Jesus fasted for 40 days and nights and was tempted by the devil in the desert.
The desert features prominently in the origin story of Islam as well. The prophet Mohamed fled his persecutors though the desert, establishing footholds in two oasis cities that have become the holiest cities in Islam. The scriptures of the Qur'an--like those of the Torah and the Bible--are rich in desert imagery. Fittingly, since they all have their roots in the Middle East and Northern Africa, with all their varied wildernesses.
Coincidence has been showing up more and more in my life lately. Did I say "coincidence"? Maybe I meant "God". I've been going through something of a dry spell in my belief for the past ten years, and it's still a little uncomfortable to bump up against the Divine in my conversations with friends, or in encounters with strangers on the subway, or even in the church I recently joined.
But God, I'm finding, has a way of getting under my skin and staying there. Not intrusively, and not in any sort of invading way. More like how a new friend becomes a dear friend without you noticing, until you turn around and realize that there's a wonderful new person you get to love in your life.
I don't regret the decade I spent wandering around in a spiritually dry climate, by the way. There is such beauty in the desert that those who stay in the cities will never experience.
"Are they still finding sea creature fossils here?" I asked my guide. He looked at me quizzically in response.
"Yes, they are still finding fossils here. They go high up on the mountains to find them."
I wanted to ask him more, to help make it make sense. This place used to be filled with an ocean hundreds of millions of years ago, and now it's gone. How does an ocean disappear?
I wanted to beg him to explain it all to me: how can we be so small, so insignificant, and yet matter so much?
People who live in proximity to the desert, or indeed in it, know scarcity. Whether they are conserving water or tending to their animals' feed or saving their cell phone data for a really important call, they understand the awful nature of waste. It costs them something.
They also understand the harsh realities of life. "The desert eats whatever you drop into it," my guide warned me before my camel ride, "and it does not give it back. The sand is greedy."
It's more than just the sand is greedy sometimes.
And yet, I keep a sense of holy wonder at the marvels around me and in me.
Because here, where now in the desert water must be conserved like the precious gift it is, powerful living beings once swam.
Because here, where once in my heart the blistering heat of loss cracked and dried up the bedrock of my joy, life now springs up, and flowers with abundance.
