Parsha Poster #44 – Devarim: Look outOn the other side of the Jordan, Moshe began explaining t

Parsha Poster #44 – Devarim: Look out

On the other side of the Jordan, Moshe began explaining this Torah, saying: The Lord our God spoke to us in Chorev saying, enough of your dwelling by this mountain. Turn yourselves around and journey and come to the Amorite mountain and all its neighbors, in the Aravah, on the mountain, and in the lowland, and in the south, and at the coast; the Canaanite land and the Lebanon until the great river, the Euphrates River. See, I have given the land before you; come and possess the land that God swore to your forefathers, to Avraham, Yitzchak, and Yaakov, to give to them and to their descendants after them.
— Deu. 1:5-8

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Wandering in the desert: a state of mind?

I walked in the desert alone once – setting out from Dashur on the edge of the Nile, past the ‘bent’ pyramid of Sneferu, until all signs of life; the flowering cacti, the desert fox, the vipers and the iridescent stinging green flies, were left behind and the solitary voice of my thoughts grew so loud as to overpower me into submission. How did Lawrence and Thesinger do it? How do the Bedouins do it? They must be able to turn off that internal voice and just ‘be’, something I’ve found hard to do even in a yoga class, quite frankly. And it is in that state, that ‘being’ that ‘un-self’ that revelations, visions and insights appear to drift into the mind from nowhere, from leftfield, from God.

And yet, even with all the noise of the city, I’m convinced that ‘walking in the desert’ is more of an attitude than a geographical necessity. Endless silence might help some shed their everyday concerns, limitless space might encourage directionless perambulations, but these prerequisites of deeper insight can also be achieved by developing mindfulness wherever we happen to be, by finding strategies and rituals and black spaces that for some replace the belief in answered prayers, but not the rhythm and ritual of praying.

Michel De Certeau in “The Practice of Everyday Life” said “The functionalist organisation, by privileging progress (i.e. time), causes the condition of its own possibility – space itself – to be forgotten; space thus becomes a blind spot in a scientific and political technology.” We need to find those blind spots, to create our own deserts: they are as important as our destinations and our goals and we should try to visit them daily, as in prayer.

Alan Rogers is a visual artist and a curator and project manager within arts development. Identity and place link these two areas of work. He draws on specific physical, historical and cultural environments to either inspire and locate his own work or to commission new projects for others.