April picks up her color crayons and throws all of them 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.

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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.

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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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Then as I thought about Hopkins’ words and kept looking around me, I understood what he meant. Gerald Manley Hopkins meant that speckled things or dappled things and striped things or brinded things are all around you, and they are beautiful in their own way.

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Personally I love rabbits. I’m always happy to come upon one, even though when a rabbit sees me, he’ll usually freeze and hide in plain sight like a two-year-old child. I love their bright black eyes and their round dewdrop bodies, punctuated by those unlikely Popsicle ears and big Clarabelle feet.

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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.

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Merton once had a transcendental experience looking at a vase of carnations. The flowers with their colors and crinkled edges struck him right to his soul, and he went rapturous. He wrote, “This flower, this light, this moment, this silence = Dominus est. God is eternity. He passes. He remains.”

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The Tucson Museum of Miniatures has a Southern mansion from 1860 where Scarlett first encounters her Rhett. A Great Gatsby house preparing for a wedding. A tenement building from the 1940s with a sailor saying good-bye to his sweet heart. And an Old Dutch kitchen from the 1600s. There are 500 of them,

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What I really like is when a work of art just pops up when you least expect it. If I stare down from a parking lot at work, I see a beautiful Tucson mural that just lights up the city scape.

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It’s easy to picture how Tumacacori once was so many years ago – serene, tranquil, beautiful — the active center of a small community in this isolated desert. And it is still beautiful in its own way.

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