The tall saguaro are strange plants indeed. Oaks and maples and such trees have great spreading armsfuls of leaves but saguaro trees are streamline. Saguaros have no leaves that rustle, no branches to hang on when you climb your way up to the top. They never change with the seasons except for their flowertops.
They have no bark, just smooth green skin that is exposed and exquisitely pleated and pocked with foreboding needles.
A saguaro forest has a certain silence about it. No crunching of dead leaves under your feet, no wind sounds of crackling branches, and no crinkling noises of leaves answering the wind back. You won’t hear the gentle rushings of forest animals or catch their eyes staring back at you, like the frightened deer trying to hide by standing still as a statue, the squirrel checking out your whereabouts, or the songbird cantillating a signature song.
A saguaro forest is still and silent. The giant trees stand as steadfast tin soldiers placed there in eternity by some gargantuan commander. They stand in their perfect postures in their squadrons of perfect formation, always at attention, never seeming at ease .. And your eyes can follow the great battalions of them as they go marching up the mountainsides.
It takes a while to understand their seriousness. These are beings that have stood steadfast for centuries.. since before the American colonies. This forest was here during the Civil War and the Great Two World Wars of one century past, and I have the sense that they will survive with or without us.
They are steadfast. They stand just as still when snow falls on them, and hold just as still when silly spring flowers dance nearby. You don’t hug them, you respect them.
In the dusk the saguaro forest can have a pinkish glow.
At sunset its trees become black obelisks. Saguaro Forest
Despite the capriciousness of seasons and the light changes of the day and night, they are steadfast and still.
Their silence bestows solitude and makes you feel peaceful.
Peace to you too, sister and brother saguaros.
For more of Jane’s homage to saguaros, go to here and also here.
“Daddy Making Dancing in the Kitchen,” a short story by Jane St. Clair, was a finalist in the Tucson Festival of Books Fiction Contest for 2020.
Tucson murals are all over town. I just love graffiti —but oh those murals!
Big, brassy, colorful — and they take you by surprise. You walk by a restaurant with a cute little courtyard, and WHAM! there’s this image of this couple right next to it. A couple with an Aztec serpent.
No one expects Tucson murals just to pop up at you as you’re strolling along town but that’s what they do. How about whales in the desert?
Or the agave woman who adorns a warehouse — of all things.
Turtles riding bicycles with a cowboy and a beautiful senorita? Why not!
Tucson murals make ordinary things become extraordinary. This beautiful one is at El Rio Community Center.
The Farmer John mural is old and fading. It’s painted on what was once a slaughterhouse, probably to remind us that these cows were content before they ended up at this place.
You can’t help but picture the artists who made these murals, and how they climbed up on ladders and painted their visions all over walls so much bigger than a regular canvas in a museum. It must be a lot of work, but aren’t we glad they did it?
I like the lady with the big heart near the NoTel Motel on Miracle Mile. She looks as if you could tell her any secret whatsoever, and she no-tell.
This big beautiful girl is flirting between a street and a garage, and really! Doesn’t she bring a smile to your face?
What I really like is when a work of art grabs you when you least expect it. Here’s the agave lady as seen from a downtown parking lot.
Marilyn Monroe’s acting coach once said, “Sometimes life crushes you down and beats down your soul, but art reminds you that you have one.” Thank you, beautiful artists of Tucson, for the lovely reminders.
To find the Tucson murals here with nifty essays about them, go here.
I have always wondered if there really was an oracle on Oracle Road, in Tucson, Arizona. An oracle like the ones they had in the ancient world where a medium dispenses psychic truths. If they don’t have an oracle on Oracle Road, then why did they name it that?
It turns out there is an oracle, but it’s a small town about 35 miles north of Tucson. You drive down Oracle Road north toward Biosphere past Bub’s Grub Texas BBQ and eventually you’ll find little Oracle, AZ.
For miles all you see are the typical Western wide open spaces and the big bright Microsoft sky. You can’t capture it with your camera, because pictures (like the one below) are horizontal,
and the wide open spaces are all around you, dwarfing you into insignificance within the bigness of desert creation. It’s just land, lots of land, with an occasional massive boulder in the distance, and silhouettes and shadows of the Catalina Mountains cutting puzzle pieces into the sky.
Oracle, AZ does not look like Tucson. For one thing, it’s at a much higher altitude. You get big green trees and grass there. What’s even neater is that it snows in Oracle. It never snows in Tucson (and when it does, people like me blog about it).
Oracle, AZ has real charm. It’s not like your average town. It doesn’t have a Main Street with stores, post office, coffee house, and courthouse. Instead you just drive along the road and you pass by the library, school, a few little stores and restaurants, and the Oracle Inn. The real town, with its houses and 3600 people, is hidden behind various roads leading from the main street. In that way, it reminds me of Brigadoon, the town that appears every thousand years. You really expect Oracle to rise up and appear out of nowhere, and then do its disappearing act again.
This little community dates back to 1911. The famous playwright Edward Abbey got his mail from the Oracle post office. Buffalo Bill Cody actually lived there, and here’s his house, which may have been nicer when he lived there.
Oracle is home to many artists and art galleries, partly because it’s a cheap place to live.
You can spend a pleasant day in little Oracle, AZ. You’ll want to visit Oracle State Park, tour the old ranch house there, and go hiking. Then you’ll have lunch at the Patio Café, an amazing little shop that serves fancy gourmet meals made from home grown foods.
In the afternoon you can mess around in the art galleries and antique stores. Be sure to see the old motel with units shaped like little Swiss chalets something you’d expect on the old Route 66.
Yet the best thing about this place is the beauty of its wide open spaces and sky. As the song goes, on a clear day, you can see forever, and you can see who you are.
As a young man, Abraham Lincoln took to walking around cemeteries at twilight. Now this sounds morbid to us, but back then, it was a very sexy thing to do. When you looked at a sunset in a vast horizon as you walked in a graveyard at twilight, you were in the sweet spot between day and night, life and death. If you wanted super romantic, you meditated in a cemetery at twilight when autumn leaves were falling. Then you went home and wrote poetry. Today people think Ryan Gosling in “LaLaLand” is sexy, but back then, it was Abraham Lincoln at sunset in a cemetery (especially in autumn).
Yet there is something about watching a setting sun that is highly spiritual and romantic. You see this out West here in Arizona where our sunsets are so fabulous.
I love Andrew Lloyd Webber’s words from “The Music of the Night” because they capture the feeling of the spirituality of sunset.
“Nighttime sharpens … heightens each sensation .. Darkness stirs and wakes imagination… “Slowly, gently, night unfurls its splendor…”
And that’s it, exactly. Webber is exactly right!
“Night unfurls its splendor ….”
Then Webber asks you to “Turn your face away from the garish light of day …” And boy, that’s true in Arizona where we have 360 days of strong sunlight! Sunlight so bright that by sunset, it is garish – so now we’re ready for something softer… But before night, the gorgeous splendor of sunset. “Turn your thoughts away from cold, unfeeling light … And listen to the music of the night…”
Webber is so right. Because you can see music in these colors, even sunset colors that don’t match at all but yet work together in such splendor —there is a spirituality of sunset, a time when “silently the senses abandon all defenses…”
It’s when “you start the journey to a strange new world…”
Perhaps Webber means the world of dreams, the place he says is “where you leave all thoughts of the world you knew before.”
I am watching a sunset now, thinking of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s beautiful lyrics and Abraham Lincoln’s soulful solitary walks.
It’s beautiful here in the mountains of Tucson. I don’t think you need the graveyard thing or autumn leaves to get the spirituality of sunset if you are within the power of now.
I don’t think you need operatic music because this sunset and this moment are enough.
It’s enough now to listen to the music of the night.
For a funny but beautiful tribute to our lovely Abraham Lincoln by artist Maira Kalman, go here.
Standing on a Corner in Winslow, Arizona
by Jane St. Clair
In 1971, Glen Frey was on his way to Arizona’s beautiful and mystical town of Sedona. He was twenty-three years old, seeking love and peace, when his car broke down in Winslow. He was stuck in Winslow for an entire day, hassling with mechanics and waiting for auto parts.
Like everybody else back then, Glen Frey wanted to be on the road. The particular road that everybody wanted was Route 66.
She was America’s great Mother Road, the one you took from Chicago to California, the one with all the crazy tourist traps like the Meteor Crater and motels shaped like teepees. Winslow was the town on Route 66 that marked the beginning of Native American country, and where you stopped before you got to Flagstaff. If you saw the movie “Cars,” Winslow was the model for the town of Radiator Springs.
Most of that long day Frey was just standing on a corner in Winslow, Arizona. The best moment he had, and probably the only good one, happened when a beautiful girl drove by in her flatbed Ford. And my oh my, how they flirted.
Frey never forgot her, and immortalized the moment in the lyrics of the iconic Eagles song, “Take it Easy.”
Part of this brilliant song came out of Frey’s seeing the girl. However, it was Jackson Browne, Frey’s buddy and guitar friend, who wrote the music and other lyrics. Browne had already nailed the epic chords at the beginning of “Take it Easy.” He had already written the lines about seven women. “Four who want to own you and two who want to stone you, and one who wants to be a friend.” Browne got stuck on that line.
Then Frey gave him the lyric, “Standing on a corner in Winslow Arizona, Such a fine sight to see, It’s a girl my lord in a flatbed Ford, Slowing down to take a look at me.”
The rest is rock and roll legend.
“Take it Easy” was the first cut on the Eagle’s debut album, and their first single. It shot up the charts the summer of 1972, landing in Billboard’s top spot where it stayed Number One for weeks.
It’s still such a great song.
It captures the Zen sense of just letting things unfold even when you think everything’s going wrong. And there’s that awesome line that sticks in your head, the one about, “Don’t the sound of your own wheels drive you crazy.”
About five years after “Take It Easy,” the town of Winslow was in trouble. A great big highway was replacing Route 66. What’s worse, Interstate 40 bypassed Winslow, removing a big source of their jobs and money –tourism.
Winslow’s town-fathers got an idea to save the town. They noticed that hundreds of people were stopping here to find the corner where Frey wrote the lines to “Take it Easy”. How about building a “Standing on the Corner” Park, right in the middle of Winslow? And that’s exactly what happened.
There’s nothing to do in the Standing on a Corner Park. It’s got no swings or seesaws or sandboxes. It’s just about standing on the corner of old Route 66 and Kinsey Street. It’s a place to dream about a beautiful girl in a flatbed Ford.
The town-fathers commissioned a statue of a man with a guitar who looks a little like Jackson Browne. When Frey died in 2016, the town added a statue of him as well.
Today over 100,000 a year people come from all over the world to the Standing on a Corner Park in Winslow, Arizona.
Jackson Browne and the Eagles raised lots of money for charities they loved, like clean energy, Artists for Peace and Justice, and Farm Aid. Yet one of the coolest things they ever did was help the town of Winslow.
To listen to “Take It Easy” by the Eagles, go here.
I think I can. I think I can. Keep going. Be positive. Practice “The Secret” and all your dreams will come true.
Americans have been into positive thinking since our country began. We believe if you always keep going, you’ll always succeed.
This is just the thinking that got Daniel Barringer in trouble, and trouble on a colossal scale.
Born in 1860, Barringer was a whiz kid from a prominent family. He graduated from Princeton when he was only nineteen years old, and then earned degrees in law and geology. He went out West when he was in his early thirties, and invested in get-rich-quick schemes. Barringer got rich quick, making a fortune in gold and silver mining.
He was traveling in Arizona along what was then a broken-down road about 35 miles from Flagstaff. The landscape is very plain and vast, broken up only by Humphreys Peak miles and miles in the distance.
Our hero had heard about a huge crater formed by an ancient volcano. This great big bowl that pocks its lonely desolate landscape is stunning when you first see it. It’s in pristine condition as craters go, and gigantic, measuring a mile wide and 600 feet deep. You can fit 20 football fields and their stadiums in it.
For Daniel Barringer, it was love at first sight.
Barringer believed that it was the result of a gigantic meteor crashing to earth, not a volcano. His plan was to find the remains of the “dead meteor” that was buried there, and then make a billion dollars mining its minerals. Literally one billion dollars.
Barringer began digging holes in the crater in 1906. You can still see his mining equipment at the bottom of the meteor crater. He kept digging and digging, but the most he found were just big chunks of silvery rock.
He literally put his entire fortune into that hole –$600,000 or the equivalent of $7 million today. Nothing, not even the pleas of his wife and family who got sick of living in the middle of nowhere, could stop him. What must it be like to dig holes for 23 years in what you think is an impact crater, and what everyone else thinks is the remains of a volcano?
In the early 1920s, Barringer recalculated his mathematic formulas, and concluded that the meteor must have landed sideways at a 45 degree angle. He kept digging into the side of the meteor crater, still without any pay-off.
On October 29, 1929, the stock market crashed and wiped out what little remained of Barringer’s money. A month later Barringer died of a heart attack, believing he was a failure.
Yet our story is not over yet. By the 1960s, astronomers were taking another look at the meteor crater and Barringer’s theory. The modern theory is that he was right all along – the crater was the result of a gigantic meteor about 160 feet across, traveling about 26,000 miles an hour, and crashing into the desert floor.
So it’s true, kids! This Thing Came From Outer Space!
What Barringer got wrong was that the meteor was traveling so fast and was so big that most of it blew apart and vaporized before it landed, which is why he only could find only fragments of it.
Barringer’s descendants still own and operate the meteor crater, now designated a National Natural Landmark. A popular tourist spot, it’s also where all American astronauts, including the ones who went to the moon, go for training.
The meteor crater still has the “Wow” factor –the feeling you get whenever you look at the stars, whenever you think of going boldly where no one has gone before, and whenever you believe in something no matter what anyone else believes.
Maybe that’s Barringer’s true legacy.
To plan your visit to Arizona’s meteor crater, visit their website here.
Jane St. Clair’s short story, “Hair Like Julia Roberts,” has been accepted for publication by Weber, Journal of the Contemporary West. The story is about a couple who tries to escape a religious desert cult.
Fairies are politically correct angels. Like angels, fairies are ethereal and have the super-power of becoming invisible whenever they want to. Like angels, fairies can fly.
However, when you see an angel, it is likely to be a serious matter, like your impending death or the Second Coming. When you see a fairy, however, it just means she’s come out to play and wants to be silly-billies with you.
No one ever needs to believe in fairies because you do not need to believe in something that is real. Children see fairies all the time, but adults kept telling them they don’t see any such thing because fairies do not exist in today’s fast-paced, high-tech world. So adults talk children out of fairies, which are wonderful, and give practical advice instead. Like eat your oatmeal and do your arithmetic tables, which are not so wonderful.
The most important thing to remember is that you will only see fairies when you are in a playful silly mood. Otherwise, you’re putting out the wrong vibes. Fairies are very sensitive to the slightest vibrations in any energy field.
Other websites may pretend to give out advice on how to catch fairies, but that’s just crazy. You’ll never catch them because they easily escape any traps through their superpower of invisibility. This is a very mistaken notion left over from Captain Hook’s capture of Tinkerbell, which of course, never happened. What you want to learn to do is how to see fairies.
Besides putting out the right energy, you also need to know where to look. Everyone knows they like to slide down rainbows. Duh. While you always see pictures of fairies in fields of lavender and heather, that is just British propaganda from a land that wants to own all the hobbits, elves and wizards, and keep them all for themselves.
The truth is fairies are very fond of the Sonoran Desert. They like cactus, hummingbirds and killer bees, and they like to fly over mountaintops, all of which are right here in Arizona.
The best place to start your observations is near a Baja Fairy Duster bush. These plants make little red dusters that fairies do collect to tidy up their homes and spark joy. It’s best to bring along a joke book when you’re waiting near your Baja Fairy Duster, because it will help you maintain your silly mood while you’re waiting. If you’re in the right mindset, your fairy will tease you by making funny faces.
People have the mistaken idea that fairies fly away from us because we frighten them. This is complete nonsense because fairies are fearless and immortal. They tend to avoid humans because they think we are weird.
Spring time with its beauty and wonder of rebirth is the best time to see fairies. We humans tend to feel sillier and lighter in Spring, which is why we are more likely to see them on a day just like today.
So, raise your mood level by singing, “Oh, what a beautiful morning! Oh, what a beautiful day!” Then go out there and … ta-dah! … just what to your wondering eyes should appear?
Tumacacori Mission stands near the San Padro River where it has been standing for almost two centuries.
The walls are crumbling down, especially on the inside, but you get the feeling it will take many more centuries for the whole church to crumble away.
The walls are crumbling more on the inside of the church because for a long time she was missing her roof.
Tumacacori is Arizona’s oldest mission. It’s one of 24 missions that Padro Eusebio Francisco Kino established in the Southwest. He came from Europe with his small but mighty band of Jesuits in 1691.
You might think he must have been an aggressive person, but Father Kino was not. He was a dreamer, a man who watched the stars, who drew maps of the lands he explored, and who learned the languages of Native Americans.
Father Kino did not build the church, but he did start the Catholic mission here. He baptized people, married them, and conducted services under a thatched canopy that shaded his congregation from the blistering Arizona heat.
The church itself was built around 1820. In its glory years, Tumacacori was painted all kinds of bright colors inside and out. You can still see a bit of color on the front of the church.
The inside of Tumacacori is dark and a little creepy. The crumbling stairway to the bell tower, the walls that once held statues and candles, the altar, once as bright as the front doors and pillars. Once it looked like the picture below.
Today it looks like the second one.
Tumacacori is a National Monument run by the United States Park Service. President Theodore Roosevelt saved it in 1902, but the Park Service never restored it. Their idea was people should see the church as it once was, and to allow it to slowly decline as a way of showing the passage of time.
The gardens and smaller buildings near the church are lovely, perhaps something like they looked so long ago. Sadly, looters raided everything here, and even opened up graves looking for Spanish gold they never found. However, you can still get the idea of that this was a little community of people who shared their lives and rituals.
Unlike San Xavier Mission nearer to Tucson, Tumacacori is not a working church. Its bells no longer ring, its choirs no longer sing, and no one kneels there every week for prayers. This gives it a lonely quality. Yet with some imagination it is easy to picture how it once was so many years ago – serene, tranquil, beautiful — the active center of a small community in this isolated desert.
It is still beautiful in its own way, even as its walls are crumbling down.
Jane St. Clair’s short story, “Hair Like Julia Roberts,” has been accepted for publication by Weber, Journal of the Contemporary West. The story is about a couple who tries to escape a religious desert cult.
To plan a visit to Tumacacori Historical National Park, go to here.
Oracle State Park is one of those places that makes you wonder about other people’s lives, and what it was like to live somewhere else in some other time.
Oracle State Park was once someone’s home. Out in the middle of no where and in the middle of the Great Depression, four Midwesterners built themselves a fanciful blue house and took up cattle ranching on this land about twenty miles north of Tucson.
They bought 50,000 acres so barren that it still has only one saguaro. Oracle State Park is all big piles of rocks and rolling grassland, but it has grand places where you can stand and see for miles and miles and miles.
If you hike Oracle State Park in late winter, its wilderness has a bleached out quality. Medium green is a bright color here and stands out among dusty hues of gold, grays, and beige. You can hike for hours and hours and see for miles and miles but what you won’t see are other people. It’s just you, land and sky –and the sky goes on forever.
After a while you start seeing details like the way the tall grass can look shiny and wet or the way an orange butterfly flutters on a sagebrush. The vistas are tremendous with snow-topped mountains above that belong now to the entire San Pedro river valley below. Animals live here – grasshoppers, mice, deer, snakes, lizards, mountain lions, jays and hawks– but usually they hide from hikers.
Oracle State Park once belonged to the Kannally family from Illinois. One of their sons had tuberculosis. He came to Arizona in 1902 as a teenager to find a cure. As his health improved from the dry air and warm climate, Neil Kannally vowed to come back some day and make his home here. He and three other siblings purchased this land and built the dramatic Mediterranean style house on the property in 1929. None of them married, and they lived out here until the last one died in 1976. While they sold most of the property to Magna Copper Company, they also left 4,000 acres to the Defenders of Wildlife, which gave it to the state of Arizona for a park.
The Kannally house is very cool, with its 16-inch thick adobe walls and whimsical paintings of cowboys riding with fairy princesses. This house has no bedrooms – the family slept in various cottages on the land. It must have been so quiet out there, and so dark at night under a black desert sky stippled with stars.
This wilderness place makes us wonder about other people’s lives and what it was like to live somewhere.
Christmas catalogs this year were selling the St. Therese Prayer wall hanging. It looked like something from an antique shop, a frame with a poem printed in an old font with big capital letters. The plaque could cost up to $400.
But then, it’s a really lovely prayer.
But which St. Therese wrote it?
People are asking who wrote the St. Therese Prayer? St. Therese of Lisieux? Or St. Teresa of Avila? It doesn’t say.
St. Therese of Lisieux lived a quiet and ordinary life as a Carmelite, and then died a hard death at age 24. She wanted to be like Joan of Arc, but she never got to wear armor or go into battle. Instead, she became a saint by doing little everyday things in a saintly way, like putting up with a cranky old nun. She believed we’re meant to live the best life where we find ourselves, and we’re meant to do our best in every moment, even if we’re just doing little everyday things.
It’s something like mindfulness.
St. Therese of Lisieux didn’t think she was smart enough to understand the writings of St. Teresa of Avila. That saint’s great work, “The Interior Castle,” is hard to understand, but it helped St. Teresa of Avila become a Doctor of the Church and one of the most admired mystics of history.
So again, which saint wrote 2018’s Prayer of the Year?
The truth is neither one wrote it.
British poet Minnie Louise Haskins wrote it. It’s published in her book of poems called “The Desert” from 1908.
Since they were saints, St. Teresa of Avila and St. Therese of Lisieux would definitely not take credit for anything they did not write themselves. However, they would probably say that the St. Therese Prayer is such a lovely prayer that it doesn’t matter who wrote it.
‘Tis A Gift To Land Up Where You’re Meant to be
I really love the second line of the prayer–“May you trust God that you are exactly where you are meant to be.” It’s like the old Quaker hymn, “Tis a gift to be simple, ‘tis a gift to be free, ‘tis a gift to land up where you’re supposed to be.” St. Therese of Lisieux would believe that, but so would St. Teresa of Avila, who once wrote, “ “Prayer alone can do a lot of good for the people you pray for. Beyond that, it’s not necessary to try to help the whole world. Concentrate on your own circle of companions who need you. Then whatever you do will be of great benefit.”
That’s their real gift, isn’t it?
The St. Therese Prayer
May today there be peace within.
May you trust God that you are exactly where you are meant to be.
May you not forget the infinite possibilities that are born of faith.
May you use those gifts that you have received, and pass on the love that has been given to you.
May you be content knowing you are a child of God.
Let this presence settle into your bones, and allow your soul the freedom to sing, dance, praise and love.
It is there for each and every one of us.”
Jane’s short story, “Secrets of Mama Kardashian,” is now available from Wising Up Press at their bookstore .
“Mute,” Jane’s short story about a hospice clown who gets confused after she witnesses a murder, is live online in the 97th issue of Image — see Mute by Jane St. Clair.
The tall saguaro are strange plants indeed. Oaks and maples and such trees have great spreading armsfuls of leaves but saguaro trees are streamline. Saguaros have no leaves that rustle, no branches to hang on when you climb your way up to the top. They never change with the seasons except for their flowertops.
Saguaro Forest
real charm. It’s not like your average town. It doesn’t have a Main Street with stores, post office, coffee house, and courthouse. Instead you just drive along the road and you pass by the library, school, a few little stores and restaurants, and the Oracle Inn. The real town, with its houses and 3600 people, is hidden behind various roads leading from the main street. In that way, it reminds me of Brigadoon, the town that appears every thousand years. You really expect Oracle to rise up and appear out of nowhere, and then do its disappearing act again.
Oracle is home to many artists and art galleries, partly because it’s a cheap place to live. 
