This was my 8th visit to Café Tisardmine in the Moroccan Sahara, with a group on a writing workshop. It’s hard to pin down exactly why a desert environment nurtures creative souls. Something to do with the disorientation of scale, the lack of boundaries. What might at first appear ’empty’ develops features and becomes inhabited by the stories laid in tracks of beetles, small mammals, large vehicles. Time is measured by sun, shadow length, light and dark. The desert demands humility and its luminosity especially in the transformational times at sunrise and sunset mesmerises: the dramatic definition of rippled dune, carved slopes and cavities, blue rocks beaten and chiselled by age; the place storied by numerous embedded fossils.
