Welcome to Writing from the Desert Places
Image of a mangled juniper tree in Caprock Canyons, West Texas © Brandi Willis Schreiber
“Somewhere west of the Brazos River and northeast of the Davis Mountains, the Texas landscape changes from green, rolling hills awash in prairie shortgrass and settles into the flat, high plains characteristic of this region. West Texas stretches in all directions, like a blanket pulled at invisible corners by the weight of endless blue sky … It is in the midst of this lonely, windswept plain of Texas, where it seems most people are either passing through or passing on, that I have become Orthodox.” - from A Long Walk with Mary: A Personal Search for the Mother of God
When someone asked Abba Anthony, an early Church Father and founder of monasticism, how best to please God, the saint had some pretty interesting things to say.
“Pay attention to what I tell you,” he said.
“Whoever you may be, always have God before your eyes.”
“Whatever you do, do it according to the testimony of the holy Scriptures.”
And perhaps, most surprisingly:
“In whatever place you live, do not easily leave it. Keep these three precepts, and you will be saved.”
It is this last admonition - to stay where you, do not easily leave it - that has always stuck with me since I read St. Anthony’s list of spiritual advice in the Sayings of the Desert Fathers.
St. Anthony lived at the end of the third century as an ascetic in almost complete solitude in the Eastern Desert of Egypt, a sandy highland covering almost 86,000 square miles between the Nile and the Red Sea. It was a desolate, monochromatic place to choose a home. Long stretches of hot, golden earth are punctuated only with the blues of an overhead sky or occasionally-filled wadi, a dry channel that filled with water only with a rare rain or the feet of travelers composing their routes out of the desert.
I live in West Texas, the flat, dusty Southern Plains that to some is the most lonely, inhospitable stretch of earth in the state. It is freezing, windy, and dry here in the winter; scorching, windy, and dry in the summer. Rain is scarce, and green is even scarcer. It is a place that most people, like those on their way out of St. Anthony's desert, leave as soon as they are able.
But West Texas is also a place of scorching beauty that freezes the soul: unending skies, sunrises and sunsets trumpeting with indescribable awe, colors of gold, rust, and ocher that seem to bleed. The taste, smell, and sense of water, when it does arrive, can bring you to your knees. As such, the natural and native life that scratches out existence here - the life that remains - is tenacious, mysterious: something to learn from and observe with wonder.
And West Texas is a place that by both chance and choice I have made my home, where I have become an Orthodox Christian, and where I live out my daily life as a wife, mother to my young son, writer, and servant to our Church. This ground holds the bones of my family, and will swallow perhaps one day, my own. Although I have had opportunities - and many, many dreams - to leave West Texas, it is the place I have not easily left.
I learned long ago that to live in such a place, then, required me to figure out how to endure. I had to look for the beautiful in a place that most people thought beauty was absent; I had to pay attention to what also makes its home here. But it is not easy. The Christian life never is, no matter where one lives or escapes to.
Writing from the Desert Places is my purposeful exploration of what I find beautiful in the inhospitable, an active looking-into of the life God has given me and the spiritual lessons this provides, right where I am.
“In whatever place you live, do not easily leave it.” - St. Anthony
My hope is that this newsletter and additional resources will give you a glimpse of the beautiful-within-the-harsh, too: to see the desert of life (which comes inevitably to all of us) in a new way; perhaps find a water-loving crocus at bloom in a parched place, if your desert so happens to be spiritual. For as Isaiah 35:1 tells us in his opening lines about the salvific restoration of all of creation, “The wilderness and the dry land shall be glad; the desert shall rejoice and blossom; like the crocus” (NRSV).
I hope you will join me.
“The wilderness and the wasteland shall be glad for them, and the desert shall rejoice and blossom as the rose” (Isaiah 35:1, NKJV).
Should you subscribe?
I will always share free essays with my readers and newsletter subscribers, so you can always subscribe for free.
However, I have thought carefully about what I could offer for a paid subscription. There are many things I want to share: writing that hasn’t yet found its way to a publisher and writing springing from a deeper well of experience that might appeal to those, who, perhaps, share the same experiences and longings, questions and struggles.
For these reasons, paid subscribers can look forward to several essays a month, including additional resources (some downloadable), as well as full access to everything on my site, including commenting and conversation. My writing will include meditations on Christian living, motherhood, and servanthood; series and book chapters in production; and more.
Paid subscriptions, in other words, allow you full access to my all my publication archives. But more than that, it will allow me to continue to create meaningful work and support my family in a realm of the arts that often isn’t well-paid or paid at all. If you are a regular reader, I recommend reading on the Substack app if you’re not on a desktop. It’s a free download and easy on mobile devices.
Regardless of what you choose, I thank you! I want to learn more - and learn from you.
You can also read more about my writing and previous books, A Long Walk with Mary: A Personal Search for the Mother of God and Behold a Great Light: A Daily Devotional for the Nativity Fast through Theophany, here.
