“There are deserts in every life, and the desert must be depicted if we are to give a fair and complete idea of the country.”
Andre Maurois
Karen Chamberlain was a longtime dear friend, a Colorado-based poet/writer who died in 2010 and whose well crafted work has long been respected and cherished in small circles that continue to expand. Karen was the poetry editor of Mountain Gazette for the first five years of its resurrection and her book Desert of the Heart, published in 2006, is an astonishingly well written and beautiful memoir. Like Walden, Desert Solitaire and Sand County Almanac, Chamberlain’s Desert of the Heart is an important narrative about humans’ and the earth’s present situation. It is a natural history of a person, a time, the environment and ecology of a place and of that history’s timeless connection to and unbreakable relationship with all people in every place.
One definition of natural history is that it is “…an umbrella term for what are now usually viewed as a number of distinct scientific disciplines. Most definitions include the study of living things (e.g. biology, including botany and zoology); other definitions extend the topic to include paleontology, ecology or biochemistry, as well as parts of geology and physics and even meteorology.” While Chamberlain was a poet/writer flesh and pumping blood woman, not a cold, fact laden scientist, her depiction of the four and a half years she spent as the sole caregiver of Horsethief Ranch, an isolated oasis in the Utah desert, is natural history of an American Odyssey of spirit and heart. And every oasis, every human heart and the only earth we will ever have a chance to care for are both fragile and enduring and as related as cause and effect.
Desert of the Heart is a study of the interconnection of living things (some of them already dead in the corporeal/material realm but alive and present in others) in a stark environment that to the caring eye and intelligent effort of its author is as lush and life-sustaining as the mythological Garden of Eden. But Horsethief Ranch, Karen Chamberlain and what she experienced, accomplished, learned, left behind and brought back to all of us in the form of stunningly beautiful, soulful prose is not myth; it is evolutionary adventure and fine literature.
Chamberlain did what nearly every person of spirit and imagination dreams of doing without ever doing it: she ran away from home. She ran not to escape but to expand, not to retreat from the world and its illusions but to embrace its primordial realities. She sold her condo and left a comfortable and not unenviable life of friends, culture and social involvement in Aspen, Colorado, which epitomizes the apex of modern materialism, American culture and success according to western values. Without directly posing the question, Chamberlain’s story answers the question of why she would exchange Aspen for Horsethief, where there was no electricity, no phone, and no neighbors. Also without directly posing the questions, her story reveals the costs and the rewards of her great adventure in the desert.
What a story it is. It includes love, sorrow, death by loco weed, suicide, laughter, a (barely) harmless sexually addicted fool, fear, joy, unlikely friends, wise friends, new friends and old ones, and the space and time to think, write, experience and evolve.
Her companions are her dog, Koa, her horses, occasional and usually but not always welcome human visitors, a wild landscape—and solitude. Her immediate world is an oasis used by humans for centuries, nursed by her hands, effort and skills into a desert garden; and her own mind, unencumbered by the material signposts of western values. She falls in love with an eccentric, reclusive man as wary of relationship as she is of a lack of what she terms “unmolested landscape.” That man’s love, enmeshed with extended doses of solitude and daily and nightly encounters with unmolested landscape bring Chamberlain closer to what Buddhism terms Bodhichitta, “awakened mind.” Close enough that she is able to write of encountering a bighorn ram only ten yards away, “The ram stood still as a statue, head high, legs poised, gazing at us with neither fear nor arrogance nor interest. His presence, his wildness, his life defined in his own mysterious terms, was so overwhelming that he made everything else disappear, including ourselves.”
Chamberlain began writing Desert of the Heart: Sojourn in a Community of Solitudes during her second year at the ranch, and completed it after she left Horsethief. It is a stopover on the journey of life to treasure, and it speaks to us all. Don’t miss it.