Reaching towards 60 Day 1 of 30

 

This morning, in that tender blue hour before the sun tips over the mountains near our home, I found myself awake again at four, listening to the quiet and to my own breathing. I picked up my pen the way some people pick up a prayer bead, and started to trace the contours of this approaching milestone: sixty years on this beautiful, complicated earth. It feels less like a countdown and more like a soft arrival, like walking out into the desert at first light and realizing the world has been waiting for you, already blooming.

Tomorrow I’ll lead my last Sonoran Desert plant hike of this season at Taliesin, and then step into the shimmer and swirl of the Harmony Gala I’ve been co‑chairing at the museum. These two events bookend so much of what I love: the intimacy of walking among saguaros and creosote, talking about plant nations and food and the stories that live in the soil, and then the joy of gathering people together in celebration, art, and possibility. I can feel the thread that runs through it, the same curiosity that pulled me into the desert path is the one that nudges me into a gallery, a kitchen, a conversation with a stranger, a new country, a new idea. It is the throughline that has guided me into cultures, science, the humanities, and the galaxies inside my own internal universe.

As sixty approaches, I can’t help but feel the presence of those who didn’t get to walk this far with me. Three siblings gone in their forties, my father gone at forty‑three; their absences have become a kind of quiet council, reminding me over and over that each day is not to be assumed but received. Coming of age in the shadow of the AIDS pandemic, I danced with a circle of about twenty‑two young gay friends here in Phoenix, Brown and Black and beautiful under the club lights, Madonna pulsing through the speakers, sweat and laughter hanging in the air. Years later, after San Francisco and all the losses, it was just two of us left, Mark and me, and that reality carved something deep into my bones: the understanding that survival is a responsibility. A responsibility to live, when so many are gone, is to carry their music forward.

So when I say sixty is a milestone, it isn’t a throwaway phrase; it is an astonishment, a small miracle I do not take lightly. I feel myself relaxing into who I am in a way that I couldn’t at thirty or forty, as if some internal muscle finally unclenched and made room for the fullness of Jeffrey to stretch out and breathe. I can joke with Greg and my friends about entering my muumuu stage, imagining myself in Marrakech and Granada, swishing through markets in generous, colorful fabrics, but underneath the humor is a genuine sweetness, a desire to inhabit my body and my life with comfort, ease, and unapologetic joy. To clothe myself in the kind of softness it has taken me decades to extend inward.

The desert, as always, is my truest mirror. My mother, raised by her great‑grandmother who caught babies and gathered plants as a midwife and curandera, taught me early that the land is not background, it is relative, teacher, altar. She tended gardens the way some people tend entire cosmologies, hands in the soil, flowers and herbs spilling from every corner, and in her role as an altarista she stitched together the sacred and the everyday with candles, photographs, and marigolds. I see now how deeply I am her son: walking desert trails, teaching about plant medicines and foodways, reading the landscape as if it were scripture written in thorns and petals and stone. I am not only honoring her legacy; I am expanding it, learning more, listening more deeply, adding my own stories to the lineage.

This year, my gaze turns from the saguaros of home to the red dust of another beloved landscape. I’ll be heading back to Marrakech for the second time, returning to a city that slipped into my ribcage years ago and never left. Nestled at the foothills of the Atlas Mountains, Marrakech feels to me like a place where earth and sky are in constant conversation, where dust and prayer and spice all rise together in the same warm breath. The first time I stepped into the grand medina, with its maze of alleys, the calls of vendors, the colors and textures, and music, I felt something in me recognize it, not as home exactly, but as a beloved, familiar dream I had been trying to remember for a long time. The spice markets, the layered languages, the call to prayer pouring out over rooftops, the cumin and saffron and orange blossom in the air, they took hold of my heart and refused to let go.

So on the day of my birth, at sixty, my plan is simple and sacred: I want to sit on the ground in the grand medina with a cup of tea in my hands and just breathe in Marrakech. I want to feel the stone beneath me, worn smooth by generations of footsteps, and watch beautiful humanity walk by, families, elders, children with sticky fingers, shopkeepers, tourists who look a little lost and a little in love. I want to sit low, close to the earth, and let the city move around me like water, like a river of faces and stories and possibility. There is something holy to me about occupying that small, humble space in the midst of all that motion, just one more human in the great swirl of it all, quietly giving thanks for the chance to still be here, still be curious, still be in awe.

As I imagine myself there, tea in hand, the sky changing color over the medina—I hear a song threading its way through my thoughts. “Beautiful Strangers,” written by Kevin Morby and sung with soul‑deep grace by Mavis Staples, has become one of my quiet prayers. Mavis is my compass in so many ways; her voice is a kind of spiritual technology that knows how to turn sorrow, history, and injustice into something like courage. When she sings, “If you ever hear that thunder / Put your eye to the sky, boy, and wonder / Maybe there’s a kingdom above the weather,” I feel my own lifelong wondering reflected back to me. I have spent years putting my eye to the sky and to the desert and to the faces around me, asking what kind of world we might build here together.

There is a line in that song that always catches in my throat: “And if I lose my voice / If I have no choice but to go quiet / Won’t you sing for me / A melody into the night there.” I think about that often—this idea that if and when my voice falters or falls silent, someone else might carry the song for me. I’ve lost so many people whose voices I cherished, to illness, to violence, to neglect, to the slow suffocation of systems that never truly wanted them to thrive. Sometimes I feel like I’m still listening for their unfinished notes in the wind. Sitting in Marrakech, I want to honor them by being fully present, by letting my own voice, however quiet that day, join the larger chorus of humanity around me. It comforts me to believe that when each of us drops out of the song, the music keeps going, held up by others who love us or never even knew our names.

The song doesn’t turn away from the harshness of the world; it carries gunshots and sirens, Paris and Orlando and Freddie Gray, and still finds the courage to say they cannot scare us or stop the music. That insistence lives in me too. As I turn sixty, those lyrics meet my memories: the dance floors of my youth, when we were twenty‑two strong and fearless, and then San Francisco, when it was just two of us left. The notion that I might “die too young for something I ain’t done,” or that someone I love might, is not abstract; it is a familiar shadow that has walked beside me for decades. But what moves me in the song is the plea: “If I die too young / Let all that I’ve done / Be remembered.” That’s all most of us want, in the end—that our lives, our love, our attempts at goodness, however imperfect, be remembered and carried forward in some small way.

There is a blessing tucked into the lyrics that feels like a benediction over these next years of my life: the wish to “sleep easy… beautiful stranger.” I love that image of us, all of us, as beautiful strangers—fragile, miraculous, unknown to one another and yet beloved in some deep, cosmic way. Sitting in the medina, I know I will be surrounded by beautiful strangers whose names I will never learn. Some will carry their own private grief, their own memories of sirens and gunshots and headlines. Some will be carrying groceries or worries or secret joys. I want to sit among them with my heart as open as I can keep it, blessing them silently as they pass, feeling myself blessed in return just by the fact of our shared existence in that small square of earth and sky.

What amazes me, through all of this, is how curiosity has never left me, even when life has been sharp and unforgiving. That small, insistent voice in me keeps asking: What else is here? Who else is here? What can this plant, this person, this place, this moment teach me? It has carried me across oceans and into new cities, into science and story, into museums and kitchens, into conversations about history, cosmology, grief, and joy. It has also carried me inward, into the caverns and constellations of my own mind and heart, where I continue to discover new terrain—old wounds that are softening, new rooms of tenderness opening, unexpected wells of forgiveness and delight.

As I look toward this weekend—toward intersecting with beautiful strangers on the trail, talking about ocotillo and mesquite and all the plant nations that sustain us, then stepping into the Gala’s light and color—I feel aligned, as if I am standing exactly where the path always meant to lead me. There is a calmness in that realization, a sense that whatever tomorrow brings, I am on my path and I am at peace. I have known love in so many forms—familial, romantic, communal, ancestral—and I have had the privilege of loving openly, fiercely, and often. To love and to be loved, to still be curious, to still wake up at four in the morning eager to write and to wonder—this is wealth.

Life is not simple, and it has never pretended to be. But when I step back and look at the weave of it—the losses and the survivals, the desert mornings and dance floors, the medina stones and muumuus waiting in distant markets, the students, guests and friends, the plants and the prayers and the songs—I feel something spacious open in my chest. I love. I know love. I am loved. Life is good, and somehow, at sixty, it feels both hard‑earned and entirely, beautifully undeserved.

To be continued….