When the World Is a Mess, Create Beauty: Walking and Tasting the Sonoran Desert

I began the day in the dark, long before the desert light returned. By 4 a.m., mesquite and desert sage teas were already steeped and ready to pack, prickly‑pear water cooling nearby, and coffee lifting the edges of sleep from my mind.

A mentor’s words moved with me through that morning ritual: when the world, or your own life, is a mess, counter it by creating beauty. In a time of wars, climate anxiety, and frayed civic life, I held those words like a small ember. My response was simple and ancient: feed people, walk the land, tell the stories that tether us back to kinship.

Crossing a Threshold

As the sky shifted from charcoal to a faint blue, I loaded food, teas, and seed bombs into the car, and as Anjelica, my dear friend and colleague, knocked at my door. She is my early‑morning co‑conspirator in tending, food, folks, and stories. We drove toward Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin West, that improbable meeting of stone, light, and human imagination on the edge of the Sonoran Desert.

Bruce from the Taliesin West team met us in the quiet of the morning and helped us unload—thermoses, bowls, native ingredients, and the invisible cargo of anticipation. We stepped into the reading room, a space Wright shaped decades ago, and I felt the presence of another maker who believed form, place, and spirit belonged in conversation. In that room, my Indigenous foodways, desert plants, and his architecture were about to share a table.

Setting a Table of Desert Kinship

Lisa Pirro my other co-conspirator in creating “beauty; had already arrived and began composing the room the way one might compose a poem. She placed plant relatives, teas, and aromatics so that the tasting would be more than flavors; it would be texture, color, and scent in dialogue with stone and sunlight. Mesquite and prickly‑pear teas waited in simple glass, unsweetened, asking our guests to meet them as they are. Desert sage infused the air with a quiet, resinous blessing.

We prepared a three‑sister‑inspired salad: prickly‑pear and white balsamic vinaigrette with tepary beans from Ramona Farms, wild arugula, roasted corn, butternut squash, and pine nuts. Tepary bean hummus paired with robust multi-seed crackers and a side dish of raw nopalito chunks, blue‑red‑white corn flour for tasting and comparison, and sumac gathered their voices next to six beautiful salts from around the world, Persian, Mediterranean, the Himalayas, Mexico, others, a reminder that places and deserts talk to one another across oceans. There was an edible “Sonoran Desert seed bomb” of mesquite flour, oats, pecans, cinnamon, and salt, and a gluten‑free torta de Santiago whose recipe origins trace back to the 16^th century, which we baptized with wild-foraged mesquite flour and a dusting of prickly‑pear. To some, it was a menu; to me, it was a map of relationships.

Walking the Circle of Desert Life

Soon, the hikers gathered, visitors from Chicago, Idaho, Oregon, San Diego, the East Coast, and one local who has lived next to Taliesen for many years and wanted to know more about this place she calls home, each hiker carrying their own stories and assumptions about what a “desert” is. Many arrived expecting emptiness: a background landscape to Wright’s architecture, a muted stage set of rocks and spines.

We stepped outside and began to walk. I shared my Cora and Yaqui ancestry, my grandfather’s name carried forward in Tarra Lazos Creative, and the long thread that runs from my childhood time with a Yaqui curandero to this moment at Taliesin West. We spoke of the last Ice Age, of how this upland Sonoran Desert took shape as the world warmed and dried, and of how plants like creosote, brittlebush, mesquite, Palo Verde, and towering saguaros learned to live with extremes of heat, drought, and sudden flood.

As we moved, the circle widened: birds, mammals, reptiles, pollinators, humans—all inhabiting the same web. We looked at saguaros as forests in vertical form, hosting more than a hundred species of birds, bats, and insects. We named javelina, coyotes, jackrabbits, kangaroo rats, tortoises, and wild cats; we listened for cactus wrens, quail, Gila woodpeckers, Harris’s hawks, and roadrunners, the everyday citizens of this saguaro nation.

We paused at desert crusts and nurse plants—bursage, mesquite, ironwood—and talked about the unseen work: shading seedlings, cooling soil, weaving a safety net where wildflowers and young saguaros can survive. We acknowledged the hidden water in this place: springs, tinajas, and cactus bodies quietly holding memory of rain, and the Indigenous peoples of this land's ways of listening to clouds, soil, plants, and animal behavior as a living water map.

Along the way, I spoke of climate change and water scarcity, not as abstract headlines but as lived shifts in bloom times, in the brittleness of branches, in the speed of drought between storms. I talked about seed and bush pantries, about Indigenous farms like Ramona Farms and San Xavier Cooperative Farm, where tepary beans, corn, squash, and other ancestral crops continue to remember how to live on rain alone.

What I hoped they would feel—and what I watched happening in real time was a full circle: life, death, decomposition, and renewal all present under their boots. From living saguaros to fallen ribs, from fresh blooms to dry seed heads, from animal tracks to bones returning minerals to the soil. Many began the morning seeing “desolation”; by mid‑hike, they were seeing an intricate family portrait.

Beauty as an Act of Resistance

My mentor’s words echoed more loudly as we walked: "When the world is a mess, create beauty." It is not a call to denial. It is a call to respond differently.

The desert itself embodies this teaching. After winter rains and summer monsoons, brittlebush bursts into a riot of yellow, Palo Verdes and sweet acacias kindle into bloom, and then, without apology, they slip back toward dormancy. Beauty here is honest about impermanence; it does not pretend that drought, heat, or death are strangers. It invites us to witness how life persists, not in spite of harshness, but through a deep relationship with it.

On this hike, creating beauty was not about arranging a “pretty” experience. It was about convening a truthful one: acknowledging colonization and ongoing Indigenous stewardship; speaking openly about climate disruption and water injustice; and simultaneously celebrating the resilience of plants, animals, and communities who continue to adapt, remember, and resist. The beauty was in the wholeness—in not looking away.

As we stood among petroglyphs, nineteen of them across 500 acres, some hikers realized that this was not empty land Wright “discovered,” but an already storied place where canal systems, gardens, and ceremonies had long shaped water and stone. This too is an act of beauty: restoring context, re‑centering Indigenous relationships, and recognizing that we walk as guests.

Tasting as Remembering

Back in the reading room, our walk folded into the tasting. The teas and foods we had prepared were no longer “menu items”; they were the flavors of the beings we had just met on the trail. Mesquite tea carried the story of deep roots reaching hidden moisture, of pods ground into pinole and chui by generations before us. Prickly‑pear water tasted like sun stored in fruit, like the quiet labor of bats and bees.

The three‑sister‑inspired salad brought together desert and agricultural relatives, tepary beans from Ramona Farms, squash, corn, nopalito, and wild arugula—echoing milpa logics and O’odham and Akimel O’odham foodways adapted to this climate. The tepary bean hummus, corn masa, and desert seed bomb invited people to experience “pantry” differently: not a supermarket commodity, but a living, seasonal relationship with place. The torta de Santiago, made with mesquite and almond flour and finished with prickly‑pear, felt like a bridge between Iberian tradition and Sonoran lineage, between where the ingredients came from and where they have now taken root.

As people ate, conversations shifted from small talk to stories: grandparents’ gardens, childhood landscapes, first encounters with cactus fruit, and dreams of learning more. I watched a subtle re‑patterning unfold: the desert no longer as a backdrop, but as a co‑host; Indigenous foodways no longer as “novelty,” but as guidance.

An Ongoing Evolution

By the end of the day, I felt tired in the way that good work makes you tired, used up, and yet somehow fuller. Taliesin West shimmered under the high noon sunlight, and the desert around it felt less like a boundary and more like a vast, breathing relative. I looked at the people who had walked and eaten with me, “beautiful strangers” as Mavis Staples would sing, who were now, in some small way, kin through shared experience.

Leading this first public Sonoran Desert plant hike and Indigenous‑ingredient tasting at Taliesin West was not a debut; it is a continuation of a river that has always been flowing. From my childhood with my mother sharing traditional ecological knowledge and stories of our ancestors, to time with a Yaqui curandero, to coming back broken from San Francisco and the Sonoran Desert nursing me back to my true and authentic self, through earlier edible‑desert events at Boyce Thompson Arboretum, to the Arizona Indigenous Culinary Experience and Indigenous Food Symposium, this day was another bend in the same current.

I used to imagine that one might someday “retire” from this work, as if passion obeyed the calendar. Now I understand more clearly: we do not retire from what we are in right relationship with. The desert, our plant and animal relatives, and the stories that connect us to them are not a job; they are a practice. They continue to shape me as a human on this planet, in this place, at this time.

As the world’s chaos grows louder, I choose to answer by making spaces like this—where people can encounter complexity, grief, wonder, and responsibility all at once, and leave seeing the desert, and themselves, through a wider lens. I left Taliesin West with gratitude for the preserved landscape, for Wright’s enduring experiment in living with place, and for every person who said yes to walking and tasting their way into kinship.

This was the first plant walk and tasting at Taliesin West, but it will not be the last. The desert is still speaking. My evolution is still unfolding. And there is so much more beauty yet to create.

In "beauty"...jeffrey lazos ferns