SWIRLING DERVISHES
For nearly 20 years, I walked the long, sun-washed halls of Fabens High School the way one walks a familiar arroyo—steady, sure-footed, knowing every bend. I loved my students, loved watching their voices crack open like desert seeds after rain. But beneath all that purpose, something in me stayed restless, like a dust devil sleeping on the far edge of the town, still for now, but gathering wind and fury beneath its internal calm and quiet.
To keep restlessness at bay, I edited textbooks the way one might gather stones along a trail. I wrote curriculum, tracing paths others would follow. I taught journalism and yearbook, pretending the nearness of words was enough. And whenever my students wrote stories, I wrote beside them, slipping my own pages into a manila folder that thickened like sediment over the years.
But sometimes, when the classroom was quiet and the late-afternoon sun slanted through the blinds in long, golden stripes, the old dream stirred. It rose like heat from the desert floor, shimmering, insistent, and impossible to ignore—especially when a student, eyes bright with the same hunger I once carried, whispered he wanted to be a writer but wasn’t sure he should risk it.
“An unfulfilled dream,” I’d tell him, “is a much like a sleeping dust devil. It looks harmless, but one shift of wind and it rises, spinning itself uncontrolled into the heated sky.” At that time, I didn’t realize I was speaking my own truth.
My own dust devil stirred slowly, then seemed to pick up momentum all at once. Restlessness crept into my bones. Irritability into my evenings. A strange, hollow ache into the quiet hours before dawn. I felt as if the desert wind was pressing against a closed door—steady and patient urging me to unlatch it.
One night, my husband watched me pacing about the kitchen, my footsteps soft against the tile like someone walking the edge of a sand dune.
“Maybe it’s time to retire your chalk and eraser,” he said gently. “Haven’t you always wanted to be a writer?”
“Yes… but—” The word cracked like dry mesquite. “What if it’s too late?”
He smiled, “It’s never too late to be what you might have been.”
“But what if writing was just a foolish teenage dream, my own mirage? What if I’m not good enough? What if I fail?”
“You’re letting fear speak,” he said, pulling me close. “Try listening to your heart instead.”
Something in me loosened, the way desert soil loosens after the first hint of rain. “Okay,” I whispered. “I’ll try.”
The next morning, I opened a kitchen drawer, pulling out a thick folder of stories I’d hidden from myself. Pages spilled across the table like scattered tumbleweeds—brittle, tangled, but still full of life. I spent days sifting through them, brushing off the dust, coaxing life back to life. I scoured the Internet and found a contest that matched one of my pieces and edited it before taking a deep breath and clicking the submit button.
“Fingers crossed,” I murmured, though it felt more like a prayer to the open sky.
Weeks passed before I heard anything. Finally, an email arrived. “Congratulations,” the editor wrote. “Your story is well-written and ideally suited for my anthology.”
I read the words twice, then again, as if they might evaporate like morning dew. Months later, when the printed anthology arrived, I held it the way one holds a rare desert bloom, tenderly and reverently, astonished it had survived.
A few months later, I resigned from teaching, not because I didn’t love teaching. But because the dust devil inside me had finally risen, and I could no longer pretend not to see the swirling truth of it.
Writing became my new landscape, wide, wild, unpredictable. Doubt still visited like sudden storms. Rejection stung like cactus spines. Vulnerability pressed against my ribs like a stiff wind. Every story I wrote left a small piece of me on the page—a trail of lanterns across the sand, marking the path back to myself. I’m grateful I finally chose the life that had been choosing me all along. This wind-ready, word-lit, desert-rooted life is the truest contentment I have ever known.
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