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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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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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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Superior, Arizona looks like a movie set from the 1950s. It’s perfect for a science fiction movie in which something terrible just happened!

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Those who say it is wrong to put Our Lady of Guadalupe on things like cups and jewelry– don’t understand it. Southwestern people like to keep Our Lady of Guadalupe near them all the time the way you hang up pictures of people you love.

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Arizona desert snow is rare . I have forgotten the sound of snow because even rain is rare in the desert. I have forgotten how snow can transform the Arizona mountains into some icy moonscape that belongs in a galaxy far, far away, and I have forgotten how snow settles into spaces I ordinarily overlook,

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