SAHARA
with Maurice Clermont

FOR MORE THAN 40 YEARS...

Desert, a process of silence, loneliness, in the presence of other individuals who make the same quest for the absolute, growth and research.

Moments of meditation, silence: contemplation, sharing, laughter and songs with our Berber guides, are part of everyday life.

The step by step of the dromedary leads us to the step by step of our lives; make the void so that follows the full. In this process of silence, to the opening of our hearts, is added the fortuitous encounter with the divine and timelessness: time fades and the infinite millennium appears in the landscape frozen by the years.

The desert no longer arises as a place of death, but as a place of life, in permanent and slow transformation... like us!

The encounter with the nomads, these men and women of the desert who plant their life of movement to look for food and siblings, marks us forever.

We do not inhabit the desert, it takes us and inhabits us, as a wealth of silence and unknown resource. The desert is a place of initiation, it shapes us in its image as the wind sculpts the dunes and rounds the stones .

The shepherd's gaze, in its calm depth and in its stripping, is the teacher of a life stripped of the superficial. His gaze confronts, his stripping confronts, his simple joy in friendship warms. His song carries his poetry that the heart understands in the uselessness of words.

And those precious moments with the sun, the moon and the stars that cover with their presence this earth that rolls under their gaze, sometimes hard, sometimes tender and mysterious of their infinite presence.

It makes us forget time to give the present moment all its weight, its importance and remind us of the essential of totally inhabiting what is. The mind, little by little, loses its grip on the destructuring that brings the step by step of the desert .

Confronted with life, death, our deep being, the history of our life, we trace the path towards the encounter of our "inner sage" who, in these places, finds his word and manifests himself. It sheds light on the meaning of our presence in this life and on this planet.

The desert, once encountered in its essence, settles in us as a permanent beacon that manifests itself both day and night.

In moments of doubt, of the whirlwind of life, called "civilized", the desert remains as light, as the source of the oasis that brings comfort after the long walk... Like the tea of friendship taken under the stars in the rhythm of the drum and the songs of the heart and soul.