The other day it rained in the Sonoran desert. It took perhaps a month to build up to it; the desert is not a place for rain.
The sun shines 360 days a year, it hardly ever rains. Desert rain comes inbetween great lengths of sun; waiting for rain is like walking on pebbles that are too far apart.
Without rain, the plants in the desert grow brown. They lose their tops first — their tops shrivel up and fall off and then the whole plant goes into shock and struggles to survive. The big saguaro cactus turn into drying watermelons; the paws of the prickly pear go from thick and chubby and childlike, to old and dry and thin.
Meanwhile, the sun keeps shining in its fake-friendly way, forcing the animals into panic. They drink every bit of standing water left; when that disappears, they suck water from cactus; when that dries up, they must go without water. Snakes, lizards, turtles – they are the most fortunate because they can go without drinking for the longest time. The liquids in their bodies become so concentrated as to be poison. The mammals –bobcat, pack rat and coyote — are less fortunate. A local mountain lion, so desperate for water, comes to a children’s park to drink from the swimming pool.
A terrible tension builds up in the desert as the plants struggle against wilting, drying and premature death, and as the animals slow themselves down to survive. There is no water, no water anywhere. Arizona has great beds of dry sand where rivers can run, and long stretches of dry creeks that run from the mountaintops to the valleys, but they run dry between rains.
Then one day, the storm begins to spin itself! Big dramatic white clouds take days and days to form in the clear turquoise sky like the overture of a grand symphony.The Navajo call the spirit of rain Yei. On his body are bars of rain, on his wings hang bags of water, his legs are dark clouds, his hands and feet are lightning. At first Yei brings his gifts slowly, gently.
Then the whiteness turns strange unearthly colors: –grey, black, blue, pink, orange– like a horrible gigantic bruising wound in the heavens.
Thunder roars – something has to let loose and something must crash and shake down the sky! there’s too much tension! So it rains, how it rains, rain like you’ve never seen before!
The people of the Tohono T’oham Nation, the Native American people here, say the desert smells like rain. Now as the desert rain comes down in great solid sheets of water, it does. The desert has the musty odor of wet creosote, and it smells like rain.
Then two great arcs of color form over the Catalinas: a double rainbow: red, yellow, blue, violet. Bright light of color, lighting the soft pastels of the desert into the colors of jewels: emerald, citrine, ruby, sapphire.
The riverbeds fill up and develop currents that drown automobiles and people. The little dry creeks run again.
It’s dark and very cold for us outside, but we run out barefoot anyway to see the desert rain. Everyone is out for the party – bobcat, snake, lizard, coyote, puma – everyone’s out for a drink – just because it rained.
I don’t think there is a place as quiet as the Sonoran desert in summer noon. The temperature is an impossible 119 degree inferno in the shade but then, there is hardly any shade. I call it “white heat.”
It is the white quiet heat that rises and radiates above the quick licking tongues of fire. White heat, a white aura rising from the desert ground. White heat bleaching away the colors from the desert so everywhere you look, it is faded and brown.
Noel Coward said only mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the noonday sun, and he was right. It is madness to stand out here. No one and nothing is out here, which is why it is so quiet.
The silence is all encompassing – nothing stirs, not even the tips of trees. Desert colors are subtle, mostly a series of pastel greens, but the white heat and the silence fades them.
I can see for miles and miles and miles past the mountain ranges and into skies a hundred miles away, and nothing moves, not even a leaf. I can see for miles and miles, but I can’t hear anything at all.
Why listen for a leaf? — cactus don’t have leaves – their leaves have shriveled up into prickly needles eons ago, sturdy little stubby things that stand up and bloom in the noonday sun. I admire them.
Where is everyone? It is so silent here, it is so quiet. Nothing stirs, not even the tips of trees.
Everyone has gone underground where it is cool or else they are sleeping under cool rocks. They are sleeping and they will do their foraging by moonlight.
A kitfox ..
…
A puma …
A Mexican wolf
A bobcat …
Even a centipede…
They are sleeping, sleeping past the noonday sun. It is so silent, it is so quiet as Brother Sun casts down his white heat rays. Summer heat, white heat, so very very hot.
Finally the sun’s cruel rays slant and wane in late afternoon.
Mercifully, Brother Sun is walking to the other side of Mother Earth.
Now the creatures will come out and they will dance by the light of the moon. They will dance all night until the desert sleeps again, until she sleeps in the white heat of summer.
Usually I am standing by a vortex .. One of the seven energy votices in Sedona. Each one is sacred to the Native Americans, who have always called Sedona their home. They don’t go there to hike but rather for vision-quests or to work out their medicine.
The sky is always this bright turquoise and the rocks with their turrets and furrows are always this intense rust red ..
Sometimes I look up and see the red rocks cast an enchanted jagged outline against the sky .. rocks that have this magical quality to form a dreamscape you’ve seen before .. You get deja vue the first time you stand there … even if you know you’ve never been there before … because you are looking at a place that exists and has always existed somewhere inside you … A place of “Then sings my soul… How great Thou art …”
The New Age People say a vortex is where the earth’s energy is more concentrated, and it is supposed to awaken you. The word conjures up a volcano shape and a whirlwind of energy — funneling and fierce.
The vortex at Bell Rock actually has a funnel shape …
While the Cathedral Rock vortex looks like this …
Another vortex sets near the entrance of Oak Creek …
Boynton Canyon vortex has Kachina Woman jutting out like this ….
When you stand in a vortex in Sedona, all you may feel is a lightening up … it may just be a slight feeling of relaxation … as if you are being carried along weightlessly …
I have been to Sedona many times .. And once I even went there in a dark gray rainstorm. At first I felt disappointed until I went out walking and I could see that…. even without its colors, Sedona is just as magical and just as enchanted, but in a different way.
Yet it is the colors that always call me back. They are a kindergartner’s colors .. a primary crayon box of bright red, green, yellow and blue.
Once a year the butterflies come to Tucson Botanical Gardens . I love to watch them, although I have a friend who won’t. She believes that they are unhappy and beating their wings and fluttering like maniacs trying to escape through windows.
I don’t think so.
I think fluttering is what just what butterflies do.
Butterflies just flutter. They would flutter in or out of cages. They just flutter. They fly and flutter in straight lines, in circles and from this to that and they do it all day long.
They flutter all the time and you can’t figure out any rhyme nor reason why they do it.
Butterflies seem to have a lot of leisure,
which is shocking when you consider that they were once hardworking dedicated caterpillars who first had to eat all the time to get fat and ripe, and then had to build cocoons, which was also a lot of work. It was even more work to get out of the cocoons and get to be butterflies, who basically just flit through their days. George Carlin once said caterpillars do all the work but butterflies get all the publicity.
I am sure butterflies flutter and flit around in no particular pattern or meaning. In fact, Emily Dickinson once confessed that she could not trace a design in butterfly wanderings either, although she thought perhaps clover understood them.
In any event, butterflies look as if they are having a good time all day long for they are so very light, as if they take life lightly too. They get criticized for not being hard-working like bees and ants, for just laying around and goofing off — as if they’re getting away with something,
But after all, they are butterflies and that’s just what butterflies do.
I like them just the way they are.
It is so hard to take their pictures for butterflies don’t hold still, and this is frustrating because they are so beautiful and live such short lives, they deserve to have their pictures taken! The delicate patterns on their wings in all those colors and those swirly lines and circles! How exquisite is that? But they don’t take themselves or their beauty seriously enough to hold still for their picture.
I love the way they slit themselves up into little black lines and then flash! –They open up those beautiful wide wings! One poet compared their wings to parasols opening, but to me, butterfly wings look more like the fans that beautiful geisha girls use. Open! Snap! Shut! Snap! Open! How cool is that?
They are so much like flying flowers that their name could be flowerfly, although I like their real name better. Their real name has a lilting music to it…. butterfly …. butterfly …. butterfly … butterfly… butterfly… butterfly …. butterfly …. butterfly … butterfly… butterfly… all day long… butterfly… and yet one more time butterfly …just the way you are… butterfly.
In the spring of the year the Sonoran Desert goes from light green to yellow.
Everywhere you look you see yellow.
Spring picks up her color crayons and throws them all away except for one, and then she colors it all yellow.
Palo verde trees hang heavy with yellow, yellow falls all over their feet, yellow creates a carpet beneath them, as if it had snowed yellow snow. The yellow of palo verde trees against the bright blue Arizona sky is electric … so electric that you feel as if yellow fire alarms are going off in your head.
In the spring of year in the Sonoran Desert if you walk in the mountains, if you walk in the gray and black shadow mountains, suddenly you’ll see fields of wildflowers, and pop! They are all yellow.
All day long everywhere you look, yellow … the yellow sun lights up yellow wildflowers and gentle yellow wax flowers on the saguaros smiling and welcoming golden bees …
No one can explain yellow to someone who cannot see it. The dictionary says yellow is the color of ripe lemons, but what does that mean? Is the color of your ripe lemons the same color as mine? Just thinking about yellow, that is.
Mark Rothko, the American artist, made gigantic paintings of yellow. Once he painted a huge picture of a yellow square on top of an orange square… so everyone could see the difference between the color yellow and the color orange. Rothko’s idea is simple but yet it is profound in its own way.
In the Sonoran Desert the sky paints its own Rothko painting … the sky makes its own comparison of orange and red and yellow…
Then when it’s night a yellow moon comes out behind yellow clouds ..
Coldplay knew these things when they sang … “Look at the stars… Look how they shine for you and everything you do ..Yeah, they are all yellow .. they are all yellow…”
He looked like a skinny German shepherd dog with a big bushy tail.
He had noble confidence about him.
The animals you meet most often in the desert, like rabbits, pocket mice and ground squirrels, get a scared look on their face whenever they see a human. They run away or else they freeze like statues and hide in plain sight. They understand the importance of not being seen.
But not my coyote. This coyote had confidence and nobility. He looked at me without fear, and I thought he was beautiful.
In Native American legends, Coyote is a trickster or the Wise One. He’s usually a mischievous prankster who doesn’t pay any attention to any rules. He’s smart, crafty, selfish and conceited. In the one and only Anglo legend about coyotes, he’s “Wile E. Coyote.”
I never believed how really smart these animals are until I watched one cross Oracle Road. This is a big, six-lane highway with a 50 mph speed limit and a meridian. The crafty fellow took his time, looked both ways, and crossed with his head up in the air, as dignified as a Londoner on a Sunday morning.
Like so many desert creatures, coyote sleep in the day and come alive at night. They have this magnificent howl –it’s loud and extreme and pierces through the darkness like a terrible scream. And yes, it’s true. Sometimes they do look up and howl at the moon.
People used to think coyote eat only meat, but now we know that they eat anything they find: seeds, human trash, saguaro fruit, roadkill, and even roadrunners. Their only real enemies are mountain lions, wolves, and us. Maybe because they’re so smart and eat everything, coyote are not on the endangered species list. They are classified “least concern” which means they”re multiplying and thriving. They’re moving into big cities like Chicago and New York, and I think they’ll do just fine there.
If you see a coyote, I hope you take this advice from Chief Dan George, Tsleil-Waututh and make his acquaintance.
One thing to remember is to talk to the animals.
If you do, they will talk back to you.
If you don’t talk to the animals, they won’t talk back to you, then you won’t understand, and when you don’t understand you will fear, and when you fear you will destroy the animals, and if you destroy the animals, you will destroy yourself.
– Chief Dan George, Tsleil-Waututh (1899-1981)
If you want to watch a coyote howl and hear his nighttime sound, try this little video by KB Bear:
I’d let people in there, but only those who love sunflowers. They’d definitely have to be sunflower people.
We’d love to draw their big happy faces pointed to the sun — big happy faces of ridiculous sunflowers on their gigantic stalks with their humongous roly-poly heads, awkward like people from some other planet, toddling and teetering like babies with heads too big for their bodies —
— but sunflower people like us understand them.
We’d watch our field of sunflowers, we’d watch the way the wind bends them down and the way they move in unison sometimes but sometimes not. The way their bright yellow is perfect against a turquoise sky!
The way they appear to be smiling just at you!
Hello Sunflower! Taller than me!
We won’t think about water or soil or seeds or any such thing. We would just have sunflowers.
We would never put them in a vase because they are too big and besides they belong in a sunflower field after all. They are too big and electric with light and sun to go into a vase. Can you really think that you could vase-up magic? Van Gogh knew better, which is why he got crazy-high drawing a simple vase full of simple sunflowers. He knew the power of sunflowers, yes indeed he did.
If you walk through a field of sunflowers, you can get drunk and slant without drinking anything at all!
The sight of them –with their wild colors and crazy shape and the way they sway and dance in the sun– makes you, as Emily Dickinson wrote, “reel through an endless summer day.” And you just reel away — tipsy slant! High on nature– you taste her liquor never brewed, you debauchee of sunflowers, you!
For more of Jane’s writing about Emily Dickinson, 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.
The first time I read Gerald Manley Hopkins’ poem, “Pied Beauty,” I wasn’t sure what he was talking about. Dappled things?
Was he really thanking God for the speckles on trout? After all, that’s what “stipple on trout” means.
Trout are pretty cool looking, but really?
The next thing you know Hopkins is thanking God for the stripes on cows. Stripes on cows are also cool, but yet …
The more I thought about Hopkins’ words and kept looking around me, I finally understood what he meant by Pied Beauty. Gerald Manley Hopkins meant that speckled or dappled things as well as striped or brinded things are all around you, and they are beautiful in their own way.
Beautiful striped skies, for example.
Or the way that tree shadows form long wavy stripes on sand …
Or even everyday striped things like an everyday striped cat …
Or the wondrous beauty of vast striped things like the Grand Canyon ..
.
Then I began to see dappled things … the dappled things all around us … like pebbles in speckled patterns …
And how wildflowers can be dappled too …
The ability to see dappled and brinded things is a beautiful revelation.. because as Simon and Garfunkel wrote, once you’re dappled, you love life. ..
“…I’m dappled and drowsy and ready to sleep. Let the morning time drop all its petals on me. Life, I love you, All is groovy …”
Thank you, Brother Gerald, for opening us up to dappled things.
Pied Beauty by Gerald Manley Hopkins
GLORY be to God for dappled things—
For skies of couple-color as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
G.M. Hopkins poet and monk
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.
When you come to Arizona (and I hope you do) you’ll want to stop at Walnut Canyon National Monument on your way to the Grand Canyon.
Hundreds of years ago, the Sinaqua people lived on the ledges and caves of Walnut Canyon.
If you look closely, you can see one of their houses.
Look closer.
Their homes had doors leading to rooms.
It must have been hard to watch little ones on these ledges!
Don’t look down!
Archaeologists do not know why the Sinaqua lived on the ledges of the canyon.
I like to think they loved the spirits of mountains and skies.
And that they wanted to live in that sacred space between sky and earth where you can see the faces of the sun gods.
Where you can reach out and touch a bird
Where every creature has wings
And where the sky and the canyon remember each spirit who lived here
They remember forever and ever.
The riverbeds fill up and develop currents that drown automobiles and people. The little dry creeks run again.
…
