There is a blue light to the desert nights that the full moon makes dancing with the sand.  You can see by it with patience and time.  You have to adjust at the beginning, and you have to run patient, letting the light you have guide your feet.  And you have to learn not to guess about the dark shadows.  Normally safe places to balance a foot on a sharp rock or let a step glide just over the surface of contours become treacherous even in the most familiar places.

Night changes the desert.  It is clarifying and haunting to go slipping through the dark blues and purples of the landscape reduced to peripheral vision and trust.  Your senses open up.  Yucca and palo verde smells and the quiet breathing of the desert under the shifting temperatures of night: things just missed in the business and quick flight of daytime runs.

I used to run through the desert in the fuller stages of the moon at night with a cap pulled low to blow block the direct light of the moon because it was like deep sea exploration, like praying a foreign country.  No flashlight, only faith in hand and trust in the movement of the body in motion and the nature’s grace.

They became a place of refuge, these nighttime runs.  I turned to desert for my closet of prayer when I couldn’t focus, when my words seemed to be too thin for the longing of my heart.  The night became a place where I was comfortable, clear, a place of focus.  Except for arroyos.

In the park where I ran there were these low places: washes, small canyons, arroyos where the water had carved the desert floor in beautiful curves only seen from up high.  Down on the floor at night they were sudden walls of darkness, cool caverns of fear where I always met my insecurity.

We all live with insecurity.  The deep seated anxiety of life, the existential fear of being naked before the Lord and mountain lions, critics and killer bees.  We live afraid, often without being conscious about it.  We live with basic fears that seem to mount as responsibilities pile up and the landscapes of our life changes.

For those who go through transition, it is a lot like running in the dark.  The landscapes we know well are suddenly different, or feel different, and the places where we skipped over obstacles and relied on the familiarity of small oppositions become traps of lost perspective and flattened depths become shallow traps.  The night changes the desert.

And then there are these arroyos that come out of the moonlight like walls of darkness, where our base insecurities become unseen lions stalking our waking minds.  Our praying trust becomes fleeing demons, a test of faith in the wilderness.

“Can God spread a table in the wilderness?” the Psalmist asked, and I wondered if I would survive the darkness, my refuge of a moment ago approaching like a purple wave of doom out of the comforting blues of the desert night.

Over and over, night after night I would take one step down into the wall of darkness and discover, as the cool air rushed past, that God was there behind my questioning.  I was refreshed time again by the enveloping dark, as the dim light of grace would come into focus in this new passage through shadow, and I would come back up to the desert floor mere seconds later refreshed and almost laughing.

Fear every time would fade in steps taken into renewed faith.  I just had to keep going.

from Jesus in Matthew 10:

“So have no fear of them; for nothing is covered up that will not be uncovered, and nothing secret that will not become known.  What I say to you in the dark, tell in the light; and what you hear whispered, proclaim from the housetops.  Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell.  Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father.  And even the hairs of your head are all counted. So do not be afraid; you are of more value than many sparrows.”