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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Yaqui Deer Dancer is so very beautiful with flowers on his antlers. On his legs he wears cocoons that were once home to beautiful butterflies who are still with him in spirit. Deer Dancer has a rattle and a belt with deer hooves and he makes beautiful sounds as he dances. The Yaqui drummer imitates the heartbeat of Saila Maaso and the sticks imitate his breathing. This ceremony like everything about the Yaqui beliefs is beautiful

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A cute smiling donkey picture – the historic Slaughter Ranch in Arizona is home to this smiling donkey, who can’t help but make you smile when you see him yourself.

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Look closely at the staircase at the Hotel Gadsden in Douglas, AZ. You’ll find a chip in Step #7 – made by none other than the outlaw and liberator Pancho Villa. In 1916 Villa and his horse stormed into the town of Douglas and then he rode his animal up these stairs, making the chip you can still see today.

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Thoreau wrote, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”

I really love his word “deliberately.”

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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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While I always like the kiddie party trick-or-treat spirit of Halloween, the grotesque images of the Day of the Dead used to creep me out. I mean, skeletons! Then a friend originally from Mexico took the time to explain Dia de Muertos to me.

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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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