Arizona Views

I’ve been away in Arizona! We had such a wonderful camping trip just north of the Mexico border in the sky island ranges that rise up out of the desert like stone crowns. I love this trip so much, we’ve been taking it for years! It feels so good to be in the sunshine after the deep dark icy cold of winter. We stayed in many beautiful campsites and, as always, we ate fresh on the road by hunting quail over our dogs which is such a pleasure and adds so much depth to a journey across a landscape — to take a place in with ALL my senses leads to such a deep understanding of an ecosystem. I highly recommend it. Go out, discover a place with all five of your senses and belong to it — breathe, touch, smell, see, hear and consume that biome. Nothing strengthens my heart and soul like belonging to a piece of land beneath a fathomless sky and having the memory of it pulsing in my veins and feeding the marrow of my bones. Too beautiful.

The highlight of this trip for us was seeing the sandhill crane migratory flocks just North of Douglas, Arizona, at a place called Whitewater Draw. We stayed the night and reveled at the miracle of thirty thousand cranes leaving a slough at dawn. Telling you about it, recalling the memory here with words, invokes awe and wonder. If you find yourself in Arizona in February next year you must take the time to experience this phenomenon! It’s spectacular.

I’ve been settling back into the studio while Robbie has been outside working hard to pull the farm online for the spring planting season. I’ll give you an official farm update in a couple journal posts wherein I’ll share with you some of our big goals for the 2022 growing season. It’s going to take an immense amount of planning and work but I think we’re going to shoot the moon! Robbie says by this fall he will be able to legitimately call himself a farmer.

I missed sharing my journey with you!

It’s good to be home and I hope you are all better than well.