Trees are just there. Trees are just happy all day long – not wanting or striving or doing, just being, and constantly changing, alive and wonderful.The poet Wallace Stevens wrote, “Let be be the finale of seem.” He might have been writing about ice cream, but he might as well have been writing about trees.

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I didn’t know mountains have individual spirits, and that, as the Chinese say, some are charming enough to attract dragons. I also didn’t know mountains are always dancing with the clouds and the sky — complicated dances more tango than waltz, more grande ballet than two-step.

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Someday I will have a field of sunflowers. I would never put them in a vase because they are too big and they belong in a sunflower field after all. They are too big and electric with light and sun to go into a vase. Van Gogh knew that, which is why he got so crazy just drawing a simple vase full of simple sunflowers.

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Arizona desert snow is rare . I have forgotten the sound of snow because even rain is rare in the desert. I have forgotten how snow can transform the Arizona mountains into some icy moonscape that belongs in a galaxy far, far away, and I have forgotten how snow settles into spaces I ordinarily overlook,

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I took many pictures of this blue moon and kept getting a white moon on top and a blue moon on bottom. I tried to figure out why by looking up science on the internet, but then I decided I didn’t care. I just liked the images.

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When I first moved out West, it was so hot and dry that I thought they needed a few good shade trees.Instead they had the saguaro, which did not even look like trees to me. They certainly don’t do much in the shade department.After a while, I began to respect them, even though I didn’t like them. You have to respect them because they are so heavy they can crush a car, and because they live in the hot desert without water. They swell up like watermelon the few times it rains. They make do in the heat.

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by Jane St. Clair Out West it is easy to be by yourself, truly by yourself, the only person for miles with a wilderness stretched out before you.  The landscape is not as friendly as back East, and yet its strangeness and foreboding only adds to the sense of solitude.  You don’t see mammals with […]

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