Traveling Through Time in Morocco
When time stops, there is only silence. You cannot hear the stress of modern day life; of everything we swear matters – appointments, fashion, computers, social media, or the trill of the phone – when time stops, you just feel your heartbeat. Beat. Beat. Beat.
It was last night in the sand dunes of Chegaga in south east Morocco that I witnessed the clock stop, and the night come to life.
It was as if someone had turned out the lights of the Earth, and God himself had whispered flakes of sparkling glitter across the black backdrop of the sky. The sand dunes formed shadows and became waving borders to the sky and exposed the milky way.
Our Berber guide was light as a feather as he trekked our caravan of camels through the soft dunes of the night. My camel beneath me droned on with his feet lightly tapping the sand, as he has done this trek hundreds of times before
The Sahara, one of the world’s largest deserts in Africa, was just melting away at the feet of my camel. Across the moonlit desert dunes, I could see a couple scarab beetles teeter totter to find shelter under the few scrub bushes. In my writing, I often speak about ‘Everything and Nothing’ as a feeling I often feel when I experience unforgettable moments in my life. But I have always spoken of it as a feeling, until now, I had never been to a place where there was everything and nothing at the same time.
This moment in my life was a time capsule just sitting un-cracked. The old world meets the new. I was trying my best to snap uncapturable images on my iPhone 6, while a indigenous tribal man with no shoes, a 10 foot long scarf wrapped around his head, and a sea blue shrug was leading my ancient steed, across potentially deadly landscape. I decided to shove my iPhone back into my pocket. Stop thinking. And start experiencing.
It was this moment, my sleeping travel bug bellowed from the depths like a clap of thunder. I was put on this Earth to travel, and learn, and be at peace with what we have; to always feed the wolf that yearns to experience the strange, the misunderstood, and the miraculous.
