Halfway to the desert, I met a Japanese man who volunteered in Honduras. We passed further and further into the inner chambers of a hotel in a windcut chasm in Morocco’s highlands, seeking a silence apart from our chattering tour group, past the bustling clink of hotel staff, and sheltered finally from the wind’s rattling the wooden window frames against the outer stone walls. I needed the silence to concentrate because he didn’t speak English and I didn’t speak Japanese. Our only communion was Spanish—and streams of mint tea poured by a waitress who found us anyway smiling.
I have no memory of his face because the room was lit dimly, in the same way that whenever I listen in a language I have only studied not my own, I feel as though I only hear dimly. He was at two removes, so take this story with a grain of salt. There was a carpeted floor and heavily carpeted seats. My memory carpets even the table.
As steam rose into our faces from the teacups we held close for warmth, he said that Japan’s equivalent of the Peace Corps sent him to Honduras to teach math. Intrigued, I asked how travel had changed him. Once, he said, he made a pilgrimage to the tree in India where Buddha found enlightenment, to the source of the faith he had grown up with, to Bodha Gaya. As he sat six days practicing zazen, he thought about the fact that fewer and fewer young people in Japan believe, and that maybe one day, belief would disappear altogether. So he asked his teacher, sitting with him under the tree, “Do you think Buddhism will eventually just disappear?”
“Yes, maybe,” the teacher answered. “It could be like a temple that people no longer visit. Without money, it falls into ruin. But Buddhism will always be in the heart of the Japanese. Whenever someone has need, they will never stop asking God for it. The building may not last forever, but the religion will.”
Takuya added, looking around the dimly lit inner chamber of the hotel as the waitress poured steaming mint tea, “The same must be true for Christianity and Islam.”
That night in my room, buried under three heavy blankets with all my clothes on and a fleece and a headlamp, I read desperately about sand. The following day would be my first time in a real desert. It is extremity that makes deserts, I learned. The cold of night and the heat of day cause rocks to expand and constrict too fast for their comfort, and crack off little chips that over time move in the wind against each other and freeze and heat again and break down more and more until they are finally left as just grains, the point at which they can no longer break, impervious to wind, heat, cold, or each other.
Yet, the smaller they get, the more easily they move. Wind collects the grains together according to its whims in tall dunes that also themselves then very slowly, continually, too slowly for us to see, move.