I’m eighty-five— though the number sits beside me more than inside me. Some mornings I rise feeling sixty, still curious, still willing to wander. At night I dream in the language of thirty, doors still opening, roads still unnamed. And sometimes—without apology— seventeen returns, grinning.
Along the trail, the desert wildflowers arrive quietly— yellow, violet, white— as if the desert, after months of restraint, has decided to speak in small bursts of color.
I can’t prove it— But these young Saguaro cactus stand there, steady in their twenties, as if the dead nurse tree still lingers in them— a memory of shade, a shelter that did its work and then let go.
The desert does not hurry us. Even the sun takes its time climbing the ridge, spilling light into every hollow. We hike, and something in us loosens— as if the day is not something to conquer, but something to meet with open arms.
Red-tailed Hawk Over Tucson Skies — Image by kenne
Morning lifts on quiet thermals, and there you are— a single intention written against the light. Not striving, not hurried— just the slow agreement between feather and wind. If I could learn anything today, let it be this: how to trust what carries me.
The sky lays itself down across the mountains like a second world— blue poured into stone. No sermon here, just light telling rock what it already knows.
