ABIQUIU, N.M. – I thought I had come to this spare, high desert space for the sights.

For the little green lizard with yellow stripes, twitching across the red soil and hiding under the cane cholla cactus. For the red rock cliffs, their faces worn, exposed and passive as the moon under attack by blown clouds. For the mesas and vistas, for the junipers pocking the hillsides like beard stubble.

But it turns out that, yet again, I am wrong.

What has arrested my spirit here in this land that Georgia O’Keeffe painted over and over is not what my eyes see but, rather, what my ears hear.

Four birds – they might be eagles – have been floating in the warm updrafts of the crystalline morning air, calling to one another with the insistent sounds of a solo bassoon, all throaty and reedy and needy.

Children walking up a nearby path chatter in the bright and serendipitous way that marks the voices of those young enough not to think they’ve already seen or heard all there is to see or hear – voices in love with, but not yet impressed by, themselves.

The mumbling voices of friends nearby occasionally break the stillness, and I want to tell them what a monk friend of mine sometimes says to me: “Speak, but only when it improves the silence.”

Tiny rocks and dirt crumble and slide down the hill, seeking their own level after one of the lizards breaks them loose.

That’s the inevitable destiny of these and all hills. They collapse. The entropy of life on this planet means all things move – however slowly – toward dissolution and chaos. And sometimes this happens in primary colors because of green lizards with yellow stripes on red soil under ultramarine skies.

I also have heard this morning the sharp whistle of some bird I cannot see and the hum of a bee or fly that has sent only his voice toward my attention, not his presence. All these sounds are pinging on my ear drums, though I had expected and sought none of them.

Last night, as I watched the heat lightning jitterbug among the clouds, I waited for sounds that never came. The thunder must have eaten itself before it got to me. But today, when I came looking for sights, not sounds, it was the sounds that hooked my heart.

There is barely a breeze this morning. It’s so light that it leaves no sound trail. It simply cools the perspiration on my brow and makes me think of the fickleness of nature’s forces, which can both delight and destroy.

But I have heard the wind in this harsh country at other times, and it can be fierce and unforgiving. It can work on the nerves and can trim trees. One day earlier this week it blew in from the northeast and cut several limbs out of a cottonwood tree near the cottage I’m calling home this week.

A few music composers have caught a hint of the sounds of the desert in their works, but nothing can capture it all. At the moment, for instance, I can hear the high drone of a jet I cannot locate in this achingly clear sky. It’s an alien sound I’ve never heard represented in music about the desert.

For the true sounds and sights, even when they’re not what you were seeking, you have to come in person. And you have to have eyes to see and ears to hear.

We all would do well to remember we cannot control everything the land and its people give to us. We can expect sights but get sounds, instead. We can expect cruelty but get kindness. Or expect indifference and get love.

Sometimes I think that what is most wrong with the world is people are persistently disappointed because they expected one thing and got another – even though what they got was in many ways better or more useful or more beautiful or more instructive.

If we are people of faith, how do we prepare ourselves to receive the surprising spiritual gifts the world – even the wilderness – is ready to give us? Perhaps the only way is to wander into a desert in search of sights and be surprised by sounds or smells or textures.

But maybe we can do nothing but quit anticipating what is to come – nothing but wait with our arms and our hearts ready for what is offered to us.

And then to give thanks for whatever comes.

Bill Tammeus is a columnist for The Kansas City Star.