Thunderheads are beautiful. It can be dry at your house and raining across the street. And it’s also true in Weird Arizona that we have ostrich races, mystery castles, Civil War Battle Reenactments and cars on sticks.

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As you walk around Old Tucson, you get deja vue because you have indeed seen this landscape and these buildings all before – in productions like Tombstone, Hombre, Bonanza, Gunfight at OK Corral, and many more.

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I love the way butterflies slit themselves up into little black lines and then flash! –Open up those beautiful wide wings! One poet compared their wings to parasols opening,

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Some say Kokopelli is an insect with dragonfly antennae. Some say he is priest of rain, a trickster, a fertility god. One story is that the first Kokopelli was actually a traveling salesman whose humpback was really a sack of wonderful goods, and that it was Kokopelli who came from Mexico and brought the Anasazi people the first seeds of corn

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Soon it was warm and dry again so that the sound of rushing water in our desert wash became a memory, and so that all that’s left for the javelina and quail and other desert animals to do is to wait for the next rain.

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Within a month, the team in Biosphere 2 was losing weight and feeling deprived of oxygen. They ate their three-month emergency food supply, and even birdseed and hummingbird nectar. As one member put it, “We were suffocating, starving and almost going mad.”

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Like all Americans, we in Arizona light up Christmas trees. Okay, we light up cactus. We have to make do with the whole snowman thing. Jingle bells. Jingle bells.

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Mexican Dance! Danza Mexicana ! by Jane St. Clair The elder prays for all the people who are crossing the desert today, that they might not die from the heat and their thirst. No more deaths on the desert, the elder prays. Then the drums begin and the dancers march into the room, single file. […]

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If I could offer you just one word to describe the way desert spring comes to the Sonora, the word would be “soft.” Spring walks into the desert on soft feet so quietly that you cannot hear her footsteps approaching. Sometimes she touches you as a soft warmth that brushes against your face like the memory of a lover’s caress. Desert spring enters soft here the Sonora, as soft as clouds scudding by in a nonthreatening sky.

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The moon during the lunar eclipse went fast-forward – 28 days of moon phases within a few hours. Then, of course, the eerily beautiful bright red moon glowed at the climax like an angry red planet. Something so beautiful could not last so once the red moon appeared, she undid herself by phasing out backwards.

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