Salt Of The Earth

Two years ago I stood on the top of Mount Nebo in Jordan, the place where Moses was granted a view of the promised land that he would never enter. The Mount was ringed by the caves of centuries of eremites who came to the desert for renewal and devotion. With the election looming , my wife and a couple of our friends formed Donner party 2.0 and we headed to Death Valley to find our own retreat from the madness of the world. Some say that the ark of the Covenant is buried on Mt. Nebo but Death Valley carried no sacred objects …just vastness, heat and salt. Like Mount Nebo, the place did offer a pisgah sight of a promised land.

In the Badwater Basin we stood in the middle of a vast expanse of salt that took strange convoluted forms and the essential salts in our bodies suggested a connection to the earth that was palpable. The poet Pablo Neruda captured the feeling, ” I shivered in those solitudes when I heard the voice of the salt in the desert.” Just as the salts in our bodies enabled the transmission of nerve impulses , the mass of salt in the desert made us sensitive to many feelings and memories.

Salt suggests permanence, fidelity and purification and we were seeking those things in the midst of the storm that raged among our friends and in our country at large.

The desert salt flats will give instant perspective…a person’s relative importance is immediately right-sized by square miles of emptiness…ironically, this arid place was oceanic. In the course of a few days we wandered over sand dunes, into canyons, up to the rims of craters and onto cliffs and the salts within our cells were renewed. We had entered the world that gave the lie to our distasteful and grasping political machinations. We had found a kind of peace. Like Moses, we were allowed a glimpse into the promised land and we learned something about the human covenants that should inform our society.

The few people we ran into were strangely ready to open up and tell their stories. The desert was a place for narrative and people shared their tales with an ease that is n to available in one’s neighborhood. In minutes you knew someone because they had granted you the privilege of their openness ….

When we returned to the real world , the noise of politics drowned out the stories that promoted real connection. The State’s were counting votes. Cheating and dirty tricks were the order of the day. In our adventure we had learned a lot about geography and ourselves. Perhaps we all need a long trip to the desert so we can live the admonition that occurs in the Gospel of Mark:” have salt in yourselves and be at peace with one another. ”

After all, we are the salt of the earth.