Early Spring in the Sonoran Desert and our Garden

 Last night, I walked in the desert as it was drifting toward sleep. The light stretched long and gold, then dissolved into the violet hush that belongs only to the Sonoran evening. The saguaros began their night watch as the wind carried whispers between the creosote and the mesquite.

I gathered a few filaments of mesquite bark, gentle offerings, to prepare a skin healing poultice I’ll share this Saturday during the landscape tasting at the Taliesin West Sonoran Desert Plant Hike.
Every hike this season has been filled, and next year, from January through March 2027, I’ll return to walk those paths again, listening for the same voices in the sand and collecting seasonal edible medicinal herbs in the wilderness to share the plant stories and my stories in this ancient, magical land and at Taliesen.
This morning, the desert answered me back from my call and longing. Our garden has erupted into spring, fire-colored blossoms, thick clouds of pollen, humming wings weaving through air sweet with light.
The whole garden feels alive and dreaming awake. As Greg watered the roots, the phrase rose up from nowhere: "If you build it, they will come." And they have come, the bees, the moths, the delicate spirits that wear wings for a brief eternity. I watched them and thought perhaps this is how prayers bloom: quietly, persistently, on their own time.
The jasmine has begun to open, releasing a fragrance so thick it seems to bend time. It pulls me through memories, the ones that don’t live in the mind but in the blood, back to the stories and pages that first taught me that the ordinary world holds its own enchantment and perhaps is the world in which my magic belongs. This scent, this moment, is a threshold.
The desert is wide awake now, and so am I, caught between worlds, where pollinators and dreams feast on the same nectar.
Stay close to your magic, friends. It doesn’t scatter or fade; it waits in the branches, in the bark, in the breath between one season and the next. Sometimes, all we have to do is listen, and it arrives, winged and shimmering, ready to begin again.
in beauty....Jeffrey Lazos-Ferns

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