May flowers

Early summer is here in Phoenix, and the trees and cacti are doing their best to put bright colors into the landscape. There is a tree with blooms like a purple wisteria (it’s not, but I don’t know what it is), and another one with amazing purple-and-white blossoms that look like orchids. Mulberry trees grow here, which I find amazing; I thought they needed more humidity.

Having learned to distinguish an agave (native) from an aloe (not native to the desert, but have adapted well from their Mediterranean climate), I’m caught up in the flowers. The agave sends up a post of bright yellow flowers before it dies. The aloe blooms year after year, once it reaches maturity. My favorites are the on

the thin-leaved aloes, with long, waving stalks of coral flowers that look like bells. They develop a small, deeply lobed green and purplish-red fruit that grows on the stalk, attached on a short stem.

I’m keeping notes; in a year it will all be commonplace.

–Quinn McDonald is a writer and certified creativity coach who believes that nature has lessons for us, if we’d only get out and notice. Quinn develops and runs workshops on creativity, communicating simply and effectively, and journal-writing. Image: from Quinn’s visual journal. (c) QuinnCreative.com 2008. All rights reserved.

Phoenix plant life: weird, but real

In the East, the plants are well-behaved, leafy, green and they follow the calendar in their growth. In the desert Southwest plants grab whatever moisture they can when it’s there, bloom, spread their well-protected hard-cased seeds through wind, hooks, or by serving as food, and then the next time it rains, the cycle repeats. To make it work, plants put out big, bright flowers on tall stems, or a flower that has lots of opportunity for birds and butterflies.

I have no idea what this is, but it’s doing its best to be around for a few more years.

Addition on May 1, 2008:  It’s an octopus agave. After about 20 years of life, the agave sends up a stem, blossoms wildly (the yellow part is actually thousands of small blossoms) then dies.

–Quinn McDonald is a writer and certified creativity coach who is amazed at how busy nature is in the desert Southwest. See her work at QuinnCreative.com Photo and words (c) Quinn McDonald 2008. All rights reserved.

Math Magic in Nature

The things we learn in school are often written off as esoteric–things we never use or need in real life. Except all around us are amazing geometries that are not only meaningful, but give life structure.

Phi is a number–.1.6180339. Like Pi, it continues forever. There is a way it was derived, but there is something even more interesting about Phi. The number can be scaled into a grid. And the grid gains meaning in nature–it can be found in the way rose petals shape the bud, the pattern of sunflower seeds in the center of the flower, and the way branches are spaced along the trunk of a tree.

Even if you’ve never heard of Phi, you are walking around with it. The length of your hands and lower arms follow Phi, and so do your facial features. Leonardo Da Vinci figured out much of the applications.

Here’s a quick way to check: your foot is the length of your lower arm. If you are flexible enough, place your heel on the inside of your elbow. It will reach to your wrist.

Shells that spiral follow the path of Phi. The eye, fin and tail of a dolphin align with the ratio. A line drawn between the pupils and down to the corners of the mouth follow the Phi proportion. We consider a person attractive if the lines form a square. Your two front teeth form a rectangle in the Phi proportions in height and width.

You can see more examples and you can download a grid and use it to check it for yourself. And I promise not to tell anyone you are using geometry and loving it.

Image: flower of life, derived from Phi and the Fibonacci sequence

–Quinn McDonald suffers from some forms of math fear, but loves geometry. She is a writer and creativity coach. See her work at Quinncreative.com

Tutorial: Altered Photograph

An artist sees nature in a new perspective every day. In a different slant of light, with different shadows, with different meaning.

On my early morning walks, I noticed that the tiny water-saving sprinklers are hard at work before the sun evaporates the water. When a breeze kicks up, the spray hits the sidewalk. The water here is hard, so the place where it hits the sidewalk deepens to blue-gray. The edge of the stain is often a red or pink color, depending on the material the sidewalk is made of.

The patterns are quite ordinary, except when they are in the process of drying. At that point amazing things happen to them. They dry from the outside in, leaving Rorschach-like patterns. I photographed one of the drying puddles with my iPhone camera, which produces remarkably good close-ups. I printed it out and took a closer look. I printed the picture on non-photographic paper, 100 percent consumer-waste recycled, slightly heavier than normal. I chose this paper because I wanted to use Prismacolor light-fast pencils as the art medium, and they work best on an uncoated stock.

I saw a tree, clearly at the top. I was surprised to see the Lady-of-Guadalupe-like pattern around the figure, giving it a spiritual feel. Using Prismacolor pencils, I began to pick out the design. First I darkened the edges using French Gray 70 percent, then overlapping strokes of Indigo Blue and Dark Grape.

Next, I used French Gray 30 percent and 10 percent, along with Sky Blue to give more contrast between the light lines and dark lines. I started with a light touch and used a bit more pressure once the picked-out lines made sense and created a pattern.

There were several possible figures that could have emerged from the center, under the tree. To begin, I called up the face I saw, using Cream and Light Peach, blended together. The work is still in progress, but it is clearly an image of a tree with a strong aura, reaching out beyond the light above and the dark below. The woman is most likely an earth-goddess, awake and watching beneath the tree.

There are other possibilities and I will create a series, each with a slightly different image. It’s always surprising and sheer joy to find such wonderful art already existing in nature. It just needed a few highlights to bring it out.

–Images and tutorial (c) 2008 All rights reserved by Quinn McDonald. Quinn is an artist and certified creativity coach who runs workshops in writing, presentation, journal writing and collage. See her work at QuinnCreative.com

April, No Longer the Cruelest Month

Not so many years ago, when I still lived in Northern Virginia, we purchased a house in April. I remember driving through the new neighborhood in a nasty, chilling rain, looking for a hardware store. I remember that the day of the closing it was trying to snow. After we became the owners, we rushed to the house and began a massive cleaning effort in rooms so cold you could see your breath.

This year, I live in the desert and April is perfect. Every day the sun beams in a vivid blue sky. Migrating birds move on through, giving us a glimpse and a transient blast of color and song. Then they move on. The mulberry trees are ripe with fruit in early April, and the mesquite trees are hung with fuzzy yellow fluff-balls that smell like honey.

T.S. Eliot, who wrote, “April is the cruelest month,” lived on the East Coast, where April is a chancy thing, filled with sunny Spring days that suddenly plunge back into Winter. The cherry blossoms, always a big draw in Washington, D.C. can get blasted from their branches by gusty winds. Camera-bearing visitors can get soaked by rains or soak their shirts from the high-humidity heat. And for heaven’s sake, stay away from the Tidal Basin unless you really like crowds. There are better places to see cherry blossoms.

People back East think that the desert has no Spring. How wrong they are. Desert Spring includes a flush of wild flowers, an incredible blooming frenzy in trees, cacti, shrubs and the magenta burst of bougainvillea so vivid it makes you blink. Blossoms scent the air and hummingbirds come back to zoom around and set up housekeeping. Spring also brings new leaves to pecan and almond trees, and the rich, heavy nightime perfume of orange and lemon blossoms.

I do miss the crocuses, but the happy, steady sunny weather makes the best of the best of Spring: Baseball’s Opening Day.

–Quinn McDonald is a writer and certified creativity coach. See her work at QuinnCreative.com
–Image: image03.webshots.com

Daylight Savings Saves. . .What?

2 a.m. on Sunday morning the clocks magically jumped ahead an hour. It is Spring, and everyone adjusts to losing an hour of sleep. Wait, it’s not everyone. Arizona and Hawaii don’t jump ahead in Spring. So there is no need to fall back in Autumn, either.

When my friends discover this, they are horrified at Arizona’s defiance of “the law.” Arizona is sort of an entrepreneurial place.  And we care about the fine distinction–it’s not a law, it’s a convention. And the reason for the time change, saving money, doesn’t work here. Daylight Savings time was instituted to save energy costs by giving us more daylight at the end of the day. No one seemed to notice that it is darker in the morning. And that’s the reason Daylight Savings Time doesn’t work in Phoenix.

The energy we save in lighting is more than overtaken by the energy we need to cool and heat our houses. And summer is the big cooling season in Arizona. Our weather has a natural 25-30 degree swing every day. In other words, if you add 25 or 30 degree to the low temperature, you will get the high for that day. Now, we are dipping into the 40s at night, and the mid-70s in the day. It’s lovely. In a few months, the daily low will be 80 and the high 110, and in August it doesn’t get much below 90 and soars to 120 in the late afternoon. When people complain, I often wonder “It’s the Sonoran desert floor, what were you expecting?”

So Phoenix saves an enormous amount in heating and cooling energy by not going on Daylight Savings Time. Studies have shown that the rest of the nation saves about $3 a year per household in electricity through Daylight Savings Time. Don’t spend it all at once.

–Quinn McDonald is a writer and business communication trainer. See her work at QuinnCreative.com

Control and Change

Most people hate change. It makes them rethink their lives, their choices and maybe even start off in a whole new direction. Some change is bigger than others, of course, but all change creates a reaction. We can’t control change, but we can choose our reaction. The important part of change is that it is inevitable. We can’t control it, the more we struggle, the more we notice our own futility. I’ve seen people fight change as if it were a mugger. Change usually wins.

This morning I saw a great example of the inevitability of change. It helped a lot as a way of seeing how change works and what to look for.

On my morning walk, I noticed a house with a big blue agave surrounded by flowers. I don’t know the local flowers yet, but they look a lot like Greek Windflowers, or anemones. Because it was early morning, the yellow and orange flowers were closed like a fist. The area around the agave looked polka dotted.

Time passed, shadows shifted and change came. I drove by again at noon, and the flowers glowed from a block away. Fully open, they made the agave look smaller. The flowers opening is change, and inevitable. I could have yelled at them, but they would have still opened. I could have threatened them, could have said I’d bang my head on the sidewalk, blamed them for opening, but they would have opened anyway. They are plants and obey their nature.

The gift of change is that we can see things from a new perspective. The cost of change is that it demands attention, and maybe more change. If we see the grass is too high, it has changed, and we may decide to mow the lawn, another change.

Change is a link in a chain of events. We may not control the links or the length, but we control the materials the links are made of. Choose your materials well.

–Images/Story: Quinn McDonald (c) 2008 All rights reserved. Quinn McDonald is a writer and trainer in communication topics. She is also a certified creativity coach.

Thar’s Gold in Them Hills

In 1871, Jakob Walz walked out of the Superstition Mountains East of Mesa, Arizona and began paying for drinks with gold nuggets of amazing purity. Walz was a German, but it was common to call Germans “Dutch,” probably because the German word for Germany is “Deutschland.” A little mispronunciation and you’ve got Dutch. (The Pennsylvania Dutch are of German descent, but I’m digressing.)

Walz died in 1891, with two saddlebags of gold under his deathbed, and the secret location of his mine revealed only to the woman who was caring for him at his death. The mine became known as The Lost Dutchman Mine, and for the next 200 years strangers and experts have failed to find the mine.

It has never been located, and is shrouded with mystery and the stories of vanishing people, mules, and equipment. The mine was first mentioned by the Apache, who said it was protected by the Thunder God.

Francisco Vasquez de Coronado was told of a mountain with much gold by the Apaches in 1540, when he came North, seeking The Seven Golden Cities of Cibola. They warned him off, with the result that the Spaniards began to search for the gold. The advance party vanished, and when the search party found them, they had been murdered, and lay strewn about, decapitated. The rest of the men refused to go into the mountains, and they became known as the Superstition Mountains. There is some discussion around the question the descriptions of the mountains. Some sources claim that there is only one Superstition Mountain, and the rest are Chihuahuan Mountains, but the people around here call the big range that’s visible to the East of Phoenix The Superstitions.

For the next 300 years, there is little history about the mine. The next person to search for gold in the Superstitions actually found it. Don Miguel Peralta was the scion of a wealthy family of Sonoran ranchers. He’d paid attention in history class, and knew that Coronado had been searching for gold. Peralta found the mine, but needed more men and supplies. He noted the sombrero-shaped rock foundation near the mine, and returned to his ranch. (All of Arizona belonged to Mexico in those years.)

The gold expedition returned and Peralta mined gold with his crew, but without asking the Apaches for permission. Peralta and his crew were warned, but didn’t act fast enough. There was an attack before the men could abandon the mine, an attack that left mules, miners and gold scattered on the valley floor. Peralta has hidden the mine entrance before the attack, and while people found the sacks of gold left in the massacre, the mine was never found.

Paulino Weaver, an explorer, came across the sombrero-shaped figure, but thought it looked more like a needle. He scratched his name on it, and the rock formation has been called Weaver’s needle since then.

The Lost Dutchman Mine has never been found, although many experts, including miners from the nearby Silver King mine, looked thoroughly over a relatively small area watched by the Weaver’s Needle. The gold may still be there, waiting for the right person to come along.

–Images: Mountains, Quinn McDonald. Weaver’s Needle, gemland.com

–Quinn McDonald is a writer and certified creativity coach. See her work at QuinnCreative.com

Colors in the Desert

Between December and the end of February, the mid-desert around Globe, Arizona, (higher than the desert floor, but not as high at 4,000 feet–the high desert) got nine inches of rain. Highly unusual in the desert. Seeds protected in casings, coverings and buried deep underneath the granite rock are coming awake. With that much rain, the Mexican poppies with their gray foliage and bright yellow petals will sweep across miles of desert. Lupines, in purpley-blue will be stitched between them.

Tomorrow, the last day of February, and a day as rare as the Spring abundance of flowers, I’m taking off and driving into the desert to see the flowers. I told Anna about it on the phone.

“So besides the poppies and lupines, what else is there?” Anna asked.
“I’m not sure. Plants grow in their own time, maybe it’s just the poppies and lupines now, and other things as Spring turns into summer,” I said.
“It would be better if they’d all bloom at once. That would look better,” Anna said.
I sighed. There is a special beauty in not having every fruit and flower available all year. Growing up, the only vegetables available in winter were root vegetables. When the first asparagus came in Spring, they tasted like the green of the season. We savored them. Today, you can buy new asparagus any time of year. I’m not so sure that’s a good thing.

“I think you appreciate each individual flower more in their own time,” I said carefully. Anna was sensitive, and I didn’t want her to feel wrong, just because I feel differently.
“It’s, like, a waste of gas,” she pressed on. “You’ll have to go back to see the others. It would be better for your vacation schedule if you could get it over with at once.”

I don’t want to get it over with all at once. I like to savor each moment Nature gives me. I’m fine with the idea of not having everything at once. I like waiting, it makes the arrival more special. And tomorrow, when I drive out to Globe, to see the arboretum, I’ll be happy that I can take another day off to drive down the road in sunshine in another few weeks.

–Image: Mexican poppy, ww.saguaro-juniper.com

–Quinn McDonald is a certified creativity coach who is learning about desert life, and the creativity it engenders. Her notes are gathered under the title “Under the Acacia Tree.”

Two Wolves in Us

This story is not mine. I received it as an email the other day, from my friend Allan, a freelance financial writer in Vermont. Generally, email stories get spiked before I open them, but this one is worth another read. So here it is:

Two Wolves
One evening an old Cherokee told his grandson about a battle that goes on inside all people. He said, “My son, the battle is between two wolves inside us all.

One is Evil. It is anger, envy, jealousy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego.

The other is Good. It is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion and faith.”
The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather: “Which wolf wins?”
The old Cherokee simply replied, “The one you feed.”

–Quinn McDonald is a writer and certified creativity coach. See her work at QuinnCreative.com