I have come to Ghost Ranch in the high desert of New Mexico for a week-long  workshop given by Laurie Doctor, a bookmaker, calligrapher, artist and writer. It is May, and a relief to be out of the Pacific Northwest, where the natural world is orgiastic with growth. Its forward motion is relentless and exuberant, as if everything ends in an exclamation mark. I've had enough of growth lately - for one week, growth and I are on a break. We can sleep with other people.

The desert is perfect. Signs of life are spare, judicious. It has been a long time since it rained.

Each day, we gather in a large room fragrant with green tea and something I learn is kombucha. Cafeteria-style tables are arranged end to end, art supplies scattered like broadcast seeds, dappled in sunlight from high windows. Today, we begin with an obscure Tom Waits recording, his repetitious droning an apt accompaniment to the morning’s assignment: twenty minutes of drawing short lines, keeping our full attention at the exact place where brush meets paper. The room becomes still as night.

Next, we make something called paste paper. The paste is made with boiled flour and water and mixed with acrylic paint. We brush it on heavy, slightly textured paper, using our fingers and any implement we can contrive or employ to create line and texture. I love how it feels to run my fingers through the soft, still-warm substance; a river of fire flows across the page. I think of Van Gogh, writing to his brother. Theo, send more yellow. The finished papers create a line of color and form that weaves around the room like flat, multicolored beads threaded end to end.

On a table, there are photocopied sheets of paper with mysterious strokes and dots, flourishes and symbols. Laurie explains that these are ancient alphabets, and we are to choose one to write in for the week. It is a strange concept, but it is not difficult to choose; there is one I immediately like more than the rest. I begin to copy the symbols, grouping them in an approximation of words based purely on aesthetics. I feel as though I am communicating with the gods. Or at least really old cave-people.

Each night, I place sweatpants and sweatshirt at the foot of my bed, and each morning I pull them on, push bare feet into untied shoes and step out the door, just in time. Silhouettes become bushes with leaves and branches; black melts into infinite combinations of red and yellow. I am transfixed by the desert at dawn. 

All day, we create. We tear our paste papers into pieces; we stitch across them with glinting metallic thread; we accessorize them with beads. I write lines of poems and quotes in the language I understand, and draw symbols in the language I don’t, following a sunflower wave of paste. Using Sumi ink on rice paper, we make prayer flags, communicating in our secret language. We drape them over prickly bushes, where they flap in the wind, trapped and free at the same time.

Although it is a group of women, I don’t talk about my life. I don’t enumerate my favorite grievances or confess my sins. For one week, I am not the doer or the done-to, the victim or the perpetrator, the arsonist or the noble keeper of the flame. I sleep through the night for the first time in years.

Near the end of the week, we choose one of our paste papers to create an accordion book with a series of pockets - one for each day of the workshop. It is a tricky thing to get right, and I crease each fold with a sheath of bone. We put bits of our daily creations in each pocket.

Returning home, I immediately buy rough paper, black, white, blue, yellow and red acrylic paint and gold metallic ink and thread. I recall quotes and beloved lines of poems, as if remembering my dreams.

The workshop was 13 years ago, and I still make paste papers every once in awhile, running my hands through the thick, warm goo, spreading them to dry on the kitchen table and eventually tearing them up for cards and bookmarks and decorations on brown paper wrapping, words riding bareback on ridges of paint. About once a year, I take my accordion book off the dresser, dust it off, and put it back, carefully arranging the folds. It reminds me of the desert, of the way light follows darkness and how, sometimes, life offers up exactly what we need.