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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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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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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The other day I found out that Europeans are crazy about tumbleweeds from Arizona. They’ll pay $25 for a small one and $50 for a big one — as long as they are genuine Arizona tumbleweeds. So –today at the Tucson Mall I saw a great big humongous tumbleweed nestled next to a potted plant in front of Sears and about to roll into the parking lot, it was just like finding $50 cash! I couldn’t let it go tumbling to waste! I am also selling jeans worn in Arizona and totillas made for cowboys to eat in Arizona.