Is anyone else finding it brutally hard to keep in touch and to keep writing in the current state of things? Of course, 112 F temperatures don’t help either. But unlike the horrific moral and political vortex around us, the seasons follow age-old patterns we come to know and love.
Here in the Sonoran Desert, one of those patterns is a two-part summer. The first part is the hot, suffocating weeks with no moisture—no rain and single-digit humidity. The second is the monsoon season, when the prevailing winds shift from west to east, carrying moisture from the Gulf of Mexico over the plains and mountains westward.
It is a season of erratic rainfall and wind, a time of extreme heat tempered by sudden downpours. This second summer is one of the privileges of the Sonoran Desert. Our desert ecosystems rely on it.
Just today, the winds are finally shifting. There is a change in the scents that they carry. There is a hint of far-off moisture. This tanka describes just the first glimpse of that change this morning.
Winds have shifted south.
A puff of cloud passed over
the sun of solstice.
The blue heat of summer paused.
We dream of the distant rain.
And here is a haiku as the stars also change.
From the Milky Way
Scorpio leaps out sideways;
snapping at June nights.
I wrote this haiku some days ago. The sotol (Dasylirion wheeleri) is a striking desert succulent that sends up an enormous bloom stalk. This year the one in our yard glories in a stalk that must be well over twelve feet high at this point. Small green and brown flowers have opened down two thirds of its stem.
The sotol stalk sways:
a thousand thousand small blooms
dusting the night sky.
Each of these is lovely, thank you. The yucca blossoms are out now and they are a treasure to see. We leave these mountains and Colorado behind in one week. 😢 A challenging time and pack is no fun.
I do have moments of feeling, "What's the point? No one cares about what you do..." and so on, it goes, the spiral of despair during times of distraction, whatever they may be (these days there are plenty.) But as soon as I feel that way, I get right back into writing or creating art in some form, (as I have several visual/tactile projects in the studio). I do it for my well being, and if anything that I do ever helps someone else to find joy or inspiration to follow their bliss, then I'm glad to have made a difference. I do hope you get rain. I wish I could send you ours, we've had too much. We're going to have our first heat wave of the summer starting sometime today (I guess, once it stops raining.)