Saguaro, a Short Sermon
March 2020
Saguaro was born from a juicy fruit. Red and pulpy. When they were born, they were just a poppy seed muffin hidden in red jam, broken open into ruby crumbles, scattered by doves feeding young in a mesquite tree or brush.
Saguaro grew this way, unlikely, in the shade of another. Each day I look at my daughter I know we are born dependent in the shelter of one another’s growth.
Saguaro is a slow grow. Inch by inch. Sometimes desert life is disheartening. You do not see the growth right away, but you have to believe in it. One inch, every ten years.
When you meet a Saguaro who is your height: 5 feet, 6 feet, growing into 7 feet—you are looking at a 60 or 70-year-old adolescent. Flower crowns are reserved for 70-year-olds.
So, if you are nearing 70, and if you feel like you are only just beginning to bloom, you live in the right desert.
Life is a long becoming. We take different times to burst into life.
When the poet Allison Hawthorne Demming, a Tucsonian, interviewed a Saguaro,
she asked a poet’s question:
“If it takes you a hundred years to grow your first arm,
for how long do you feel the sensation of growing something new?”
Imagine the arm that is growing in you. How long has it been imagining itself? How long have you been emerging before the world even saw what you had been doing the entire time?
Even that growth needs sheltering. Some say, even this benefits from some sheltering—with some pups establishing more easily if there is a little shade from a nearby tree. But even then, you may only show this new beginning when you are nearly 100 years old.
100 years old! Imagine if you gave yourselves that timeline to try out your first arm!
Instead, each of us, getting 100 years to feel the world before we must begin reaching into it! (What if you didn’t have to pick your undergraduate degree until you were 100!? What if you were still allowed to need help?)
Imagine that, after all that time growing, all that time making a little more room for yourself… a woodpecker shows up.
She clings to the side of Saguaro. And she begins her work. Slowly, chip by chip, excavating the side of their waxy flesh. At first, like a friend scratching an itch you hadn’t been able to reach.
Small at first, but the woodpecker family needs just a little more room… and then, a little more.
Suddenly, Saguaro is itself the nurse tree to the birds.
When the eggs have hatched, when the babies have made their unsteady jump from the edges of Saguaro, when the family leaves without turning back, does Saguaro feel the absence?
What is it like to make room for what leaves you?
Saguaro says: Stay open. The hole does not close in on itself, bandaged up like a wound needing hiding. It shines like an invitation.
The tired families of un-wood-peckers show up with their bags of nesting materials at the hotel room door, make their way in, and… make a little more room.
Owl, finch, martin, flycatcher, Goldilocks and the Three Bears, this hole is just right… and there they are, making just a little more room, and a little more room in the 125… 150 year old… flesh of the oldest, unlikely, being.
So, if you find yourself living in the desert,
and if you feel stuck at 15 years old….30 years old…
70 years old… 150 years old…
remember this Saguaro’s wisdom:
You are a person of the long becoming
You are a person of the long awaited bloom,
You are a person of a little more room,
You are food for this world--
there is a hole in your heart
and from this place there is life.
