I arrived with a bag full of mountain slides, notes on the desert fathers, and a longing for landscape. Most of all, I had come for healing, seeking respite from a mother's dying of cancer. I came to the desert to find peace, to seek a safe place, to read deep consolation off steep canyon walls.

That was what I came for - but that wasn't what the desert had to teach me. One seldom learns what he thinks he most needs to be taught. I began on the first day of the seminar talking about "spirituality," a word that frankly makes a lot of people gag. Too often it brings to mind a contemptus mundi tradition, smelling of snake-oil remedies, overly preoccupied with escape, speaking only of sweet and nice things in its flight from the world.

Many of us at Ghost Ranch that week were looking for just such an escape - half-burnt-out people coming to the desert to be put back together again. But the desert rarely functions as a resort. It offers little comfort. None of its answers are easy ones. As the early desert fathers and mothers knew, the wilderness possesses a stubborn indifference to one's fervid quest for solace. Entry into the desert is marked invariably by confusion and loss. Something will always seem amiss.

I sensed that keenly during my first few days at Ghost Ranch. The group was going well. The food was good. The place was beginning to grow on us all with a deep mystery. But something still was missing. We had not yet encountered the desert's wildness. It posed no danger to us. The structures of our world had not yet been threatened by it.

As I went hiking alone in the desert that afternoon, I determined to meet the landscape on its own terms, without expectations, submitting at last to its sublime disregard for all my petty concerns. Abandonment, after all, is what the desert teaches best. Here it is that we enter an interior wilderness more fearful and promising than anything charted on terrestrial maps. The wildest, most dangerous trails are always the ones within.

With the sun still shining, I took the path into a box canyon several miles behind Ghost Ranch. Thunderstorms had been coming up every afternoon and people were reluctant to venture out very far. Yet I desperately needed the time alone, getting away far enough to approach the border of that interior landscape I had neglected so long - the one accessible only through wildness.

It was a beautiful afternoon. A slight breeze rustled leaves on the cottonwood trees. The smell of sage was made sharper by recent rains. I followed a small creek into the canyon, noticing deer tracks along its bank. Later in the week, tracks of a mountain lion were seen along that same trail. It was a fine place for a lion to trap deer - up a narrow canyon with no escape.

By the time I had followed the creek to the canyon's end, the cliffs had risen to some 200 feet on either side. The rock had chipped away from the edge at the top, leaving an overhang all the way around. There was no way out. Tripping over rock fragments, fallen from above, I heard a loud and sustained echo, filling the place with sound. It was a compelling place, a strange end to which I had somehow been invited.

In the center of the space at the end of the canyon lay a large, flat rock. Nearby a trickle of water seeped out from under the canyon wall, feeding the creek I had been following. I lay on the rock for a long while, waiting for nothing in particular watching cliff swallows sweep over the canyon rim, noticing a hummingbird in the fir tree nearby, being aware of gradually gathering clouds.

I had brought along a pipe and tobacco, but had forgotten matches. Yet the tobacco seemed a good gift in itself. Impulsively, I threw a pinch of it in each of the four directions, so as to sanctify the place and honor its spirit. At the time, the action seemed perfectly natural, not at all an effort to mimic native practice. In its origins, I suspect, ritual is not learned. It is earth-taught.

As I lay in silence, dark, churning clouds began to fill the space of sky framed by the canyon rim. Then came the first loud crash of thunder, and I knew I was about to be caught by a cloudburst in the middle of the desert. As the initial drops of rain fell, I scrambled up a nearby ledge, looking for shelter, finding the small opening of a cave going into the canyon wall. It wasn't large. I looked carefully to make sure it was empty and then crawled in, just as the heavy rains let loose. Soon they were followed by hail the size of quarters - bouncing everywhere, ricocheting off the rocks, dancing in the fierce thunder and lightning. There I lay, under the mountain, looking out, in the midst of this wild apocalypse, wide-eyed at its glory scribbling away in the yellow pad I use for a journal.

Soon sheets of water began to pour over the top of the canyon rim, loosening the dirt and rocks high above. Then the sound of falling boulders echoed through the canyon like a shotgun blast, crashing right before me onto the path I had followed an hour or so before. I heard the sound of other rocks falling farther down the ravine. Torrents of water flowed wildly in every direction. What was it that had followed me into the remoteness of that box canyon, having stalked me to its very end, hidden now in the cleft of the rock?

I learned later that there were Indian petroglyphs scratched on the inside of the cave where I lay. I never saw them, but I knew from the place that they must have been pictures of death. There was no doubt that this was a dying place, a place where things necessarily came to an end. That is the way of the desert. The pictures there in the cave would be ones of a deer stalked by a young brave or a mountain lion.

They would tell stories I didn't want to remember. Pictures of a young boy at the age of thirteen, whose father had been suddenly and violently killed. A boy who all of his life had sought the lost father. Pictures of that same boy much later in his forties, sitting beside a mother, waiting for a long and painful death to end. A boy whose parents had both died (or were dying) at times in his life when he was struggling most to be born. I knew the pictures. But I hadn't known enough at first hand of the grieving that had to go along with them.

As the rain passed, and the rock slides ended, I crawled out of the cave. The winds quickly carried the storm clouds away, and before long the sun was out again, shining on a world perfectly new. Water droplets on every leaf and rock were lit by the sun. The air was clear as crystal, cleansed by rain. Silence had come again.

Then gradually a trickle of water began to flow over the rim at the canyon's end, cascading two hundred feet down in sunlit brilliance onto the rock where I had lain before. It grew in strength, becoming a massive waterfall of light-tan waters, fed by arroyos high above, bringing the runoff of rain from surrounding mesas. These living waters poured into this place of death. I stood there watching. Then slowly I walked through the falling water, being soaked in its sand-filled wetness, as a loud, resounding laughter erupted spontaneously from deep inside me. This fierce, good laughter came from the same dark place from where the sobbing had come the day before. It echoed down the canyon, summoning everything to life.

What was this place? Everywhere I walked, life burst out of the ground before and behind me. The desert after a furious rain is incredibly alive; falling water courses over the rocks and fills arroyos. One can practically feel the trees and the sage brush gorging themselves with it. I began to walk back down the canyon, following the creek that was now beginning quickly to rise, coming to a place I had passed on the way in, where a side canyon joined the one I had been walking. The place where the two canyons met was filled with vegetation, sparkling now with life.

Here dark, red waters flowed down from the side canyon to join the light-tan waters of the upper creek, flowing side by side, then merging together in some great mystery. The new waters entering the creek were a deep, chocolaty-red, the runoff of multicolored mesas above. They formed a menstrual flow these dark waters, as if the land were cleansing itself of its life-giving blood. Viscous and thick, they poured especially heavily from between two large boulders. I climbed over to the place, cupped my hands, and let the waters fall over my head, rolling down my hair and onto my shoulders. Here, at the place of the joining of the two waters, everything came together.

In the joy of that afternoon sun, I walked on back down the canyon toward home, stopping at last to take off my clothes (it just seemed the right thing to do). Walking naked through the land, I turned in slow circles, drinking in the red and orange grandeur of the rocky cliffs around me, all newly washed by rain. In those few moments, I moved through the canyon as part of its landscape, knowing the land to have taught me something I could not name.