Haibun: The Mother of Autumn

It seems that spring was when I mentioned resilience, you know, the birds, the green grass, the fuzzy little critters learning to walk, and the idea of spring surviving winter. Resilience was a natural observation. But the Sonoran Desert now asks something different of me. 

Resilience is the autumn here: the surviving of the brutal summer sun, a sun that can melt just about anything, a sun that can dehydrate a human in the fast and slow of a few summer days. Summer is the sun of no mercy.

Yet, with under that brutal sun stand the saguaro; decade after decade, century after century. As the ecosystem of the little life that burrows into it, it not only survives the sun, but takes the life of the desert through that unrelenting sun with it. It is the unbroken mother of this desert and autumn is when she seems to give birth to that which crawls or flies around her. 

And scarred like all good mothers, she is beautiful in her scars and love.

every saguaro: 

survivor’s morrow, thick shells.

autumn’s home burrows