The Void Is Not Empty

What the Desert Taught Me About the Sacred Disorientation of Becoming

I recently returned to Joshua Tree, a place that has always felt like a portal for me. Of all the places I have traveled, it is one of the few where I feel deeply connected to something beyond this physical world—a place where the veil feels thinner and the mystery of life feels more tangible. There is a multidimensionality to the desert that is difficult to explain, but that’s a story for another time.

Each time I go, I leave feeling liberated. Not the kind of liberation that comes from having all the answers, discovering a new purpose, or becoming a more elevated version of myself. I leave feeling surrendered. Surrendered to the vastness of life, to the intelligence of the unknown, and to the truth I am something much greater than the identities I have constructed.

I’ve noticed that the desert often calls me back during the seasons in my life where I am in-between: when one chapter has closed but the next has not yet revealed itself. But this time was different. It felt more cellular. Less like a change in thought and more like a shedding. A releasing of who I believed I needed to be in order to be loved, successful, worthy, or enough.

As I sat on a boulder along my favorite trail, Split Rock, surrounded by the profound silence of the desert, I realized the stillness was teaching me something I had spent much of my life resisting:

The void is not empty.

The Season Without a Map

The unknown has never been comfortable for me. If you know anything about astrology, my Scorpio stellium has spent a lifetime trying to teach me this exact lesson: surrender, trust, and the acceptance that not everything meant for me can be controlled, predicted, or understood before I walk toward it.

Most of my life, my intuition has been a reliable compass. It has moved me from point A to point B with a clarity I deeply trusted. I could feel when a relationship was no longer aligned. I could sense when a career shift was coming. I could name what I wanted because there was usually a clear contrast—something I was moving away from or something I knew I was missing.

But this season is different.

For the first time in my life, I am sitting in a space that feels directionless. There is no clear next step. No obvious path calling my name. In fact, there are many paths available to me, and yet none of them feel fully aligned.

And maybe that is what is so unsettling.

As humans, we are often remarkably good at identifying our desires through the lens of what we lack. We know what we are hungry for when something is absent. We know what we want when something hurts.

But what happens when your life is no longer being built as a response to a wound? What happens when you are no longer chasing based on an absence, but listening for meaning?

I am discovering that this kind of uncertainty is far more terrifying. Because the void is no longer asking me, “What do you need to escape?” It is asking, “Can you trust yourself when the path has not yet revealed itself?”

The Addiction to Knowing

There is a wisdom that can only be heard when we stop trying to outrun the silence.

The problem is that the mind hates a void. It hates uncertainty. It wants a plan, an answer, a destination. The moment there is space, it begins filling it with noise: What should I do next? What if I make the wrong decision? Am I wasting time? Should I leave? Should I stay? What does this mean?

In all honesty, I’ve noticed how quickly I turn to Google, books, podcasts, and the opinions of others in search of an answer that only my own inner wisdom can reveal. Not because information is inherently bad, but because sometimes the search itself becomes an escape from sitting in the discomfort of not knowing.

This is the addiction to knowing.

At its core, it is an addiction to the illusion of power and control. We convince ourselves that if we gather enough information, think hard enough, or analyze every possible path, we can protect ourselves from uncertainty. But life has shown me again and again that certainty was never the thing that made me safe.

The greatest wisdom I have received has never arrived in the noise. It has emerged in the pause.

So this season is asking me to practice a different way of being: to notice when my mind begins creating stories, to gently step out of the endless loops of analysis, and to return to my body over and over again.

To feel my feet on the ground. To breathe. To listen. To remember that not having an answer does not mean I am lost.

The void does not withhold answers; it simply speaks a language the thinking mind does not understand.

The Desert Is Not Dead

I used to associate the word void with sadness.

The void of unmet needs. The ache of recognizing what I did not receive. The grief of accepting that certain parts of my story would never be rewritten. And while there was profound healing in allowing myself to feel that emptiness rather than trying to fill it, I am beginning to understand the void in a completely different way.

The desert taught me a new meaning.

When we look out at the desert from afar, we might see a barren landscape. Dryness, emptiness, a place where nothing could possibly survive. But if we slow down and look closely, we can see the aliveness: a lizard moving across a rock, wildflowers blooming in the most unexpected places, ancient trees with roots that have learned how to reach deep into the earth. Life is everywhere.

It just moves differently.

There is something about the desert that does not apologize for its seasons of stillness. It does not rush to bloom to prove it is alive. It trusts the unseen processes happening beneath the surface.

And as humans who go through the cyclical nature of life, we are no different.

We spend so much of our lives celebrating the butterfly—the transformation, the emergence, the visible evidence that something beautiful has occurred. We post the before and after. We share the breakthrough. We admire the person who has become.

But I am learning to appreciate the beauty of the cocoon.

The dark, quiet, disorienting space where nothing appears to be happening, yet everything is changing. Where the old form has dissolved and the new one has not fully taken shape. Where there is no map, no certainty, and no clear identity to cling to.

The cocoon is not empty.

The desert is not dead.

The void is not a lack of life—it is life preparing itself in a form we have not yet learned how to recognize.

The Ego’s Panic

Of course we resist the void. Of course the cocoon feels unbearable.

Our minds and bodies are wired to seek what is familiar. The ego’s job is not to guide us toward our highest expansion—it is to protect us from what feels unknown. And the nervous system will almost always choose a familiar pain over an unfamiliar possibility because at least it knows how to survive there.

This is why we return to relationships that no longer nourish us. Or why we cling to identities that have expired. And why we stay in careers, roles, and patterns that no longer reflect who we are becoming. Not because we are weak. Not because we lack awareness. But because those versions of ourselves were once intelligent adaptations.

They kept us safe.

The problem is that the same strategies that protected us in one season can become the very things that prevent us from expanding into the next.

And so when we enter a period of transformation, the ego sounds the alarm. It tells us we are behind. It tells us we are making a mistake. It tells us to hurry up and find the answer, pick a path, become someone, do something—anything—to escape the discomfort of not knowing.

We call this feeling being stuck, or a crisis, or a breakdown.

But what if it is simply the moment when the old self no longer fits, and the new self has not yet been fully formed?

What if the discomfort is not evidence that something is wrong, but evidence that something deeply unconscious is reorganizing itself?

The caterpillar does not become the butterfly by avoiding the cocoon.

The desert does not need to see the bloom to know life is still there.

There are transformations that can only happen in the spaces where our old ways of surviving no longer work, and we are asked to stay long enough to discover who we are without them.

The Invitation of the Void

The void asks different questions.

For most of my life, I approached uncertainty with the same urgency many of us do: I searched for the lesson, the answer, the next right step. I believed the purpose of the in-between was to move through it as quickly as possible, to extract the wisdom, make the decision, and arrive at the next chapter.

But the void does not ask us to move faster. It asks us to become still.

It asks us to stop searching for the map and start listening to the parts of ourselves that have been waiting underneath the noise.

Not:

What is my next move?

How do I become someone new?

How do I get out of this feeling?

But:

Who am I without everything I once used to define myself?

What parts of me have been waiting patiently beneath the identities, achievements, roles, and expectations I have carried?

What is my body trying to tell me that my mind keeps interrupting?

What wisdom has my unconscious been holding while my conscious mind has been busy searching for certainty?

Can I surrender to what is unfolding before I understand where it is leading me?

The irony is that the thing I have spent most of my life trying to avoid—the silence, the emptiness, the absence of an answer—is the very place where I can finally hear myself.

Not the self that was built from survival. Not the self that was shaped by what I thought I needed to be in order to be loved, successful, or enough.

The Self that existed before all of that.

The Self that has been there all along.

And perhaps this is the greatest invitation of the void: not to become someone else, but to remember the person you were before the world told you who you needed to be.

Thank you, Joshua Tree, for your magic every time.