Finding New Favorites

On living long enough to find out there's more to love.

There are so many things we don’t know about until we do. I think of the many times in my life I’ve half-jokingly asked, what else aren’t they telling me? after discovering something new that I really enjoy and had never before heard of. I remember the first time I tasted authentic South Indian food, the first time I realized that public land exists and flipped the idea of “Million Dollar Views” on its head, the first time I became aware of the desert globemallow.

Desert globemallow is a wildflower that thrives in the desert southwest United States and neighboring regions in northwest Mexico. Its orange cup-shaped flowers reach towards the sky in the mesmerizing red rock country of Navajo Nation and its hearty roots find sustenance between sidewalk cracks in Tucson. I’ve seen it bloom on sunny slopes around Durango and found its flowers dotting planted areas in Santa Fe (both places it’s been used as a low-water accent plant). Its native range (and the places it’ll grow with a bit of help) mirrors all of my favorite places – coincidentally, places that I could scarcely envision as recently as a few years ago.

That there are future favorites we don’t even know of yet is some of the best yet most bittersweet news I can imagine. I find myself oscillating between celebration and grief each time I think about all the things I love now and lived most of my life without. How lucky are we to finally live long enough to discover our true loves. How sad it is to think of all the days we lived with an aimless yearning, longing for things we couldn’t even imagine.

When vapid reminders that “there are better days ahead” fall flat, one thing that always feels true for me is the fact that flowers will bloom again when the season is right. And there are many flowers we have yet to see.

This simple truth bears repeating, time and again. It is miraculous to think about what we used to not know, and what we know now. What we used to yearn for, and what we once couldn’t even imagine we might one day desire. I am amazed by plants that thrive in landscapes we are conditioned to label “harsh,” and by landscapes that I didn’t know existed until a few short years ago.

I was recently tasked with giving a presentation to a group of friends old and new as part of a so-called bachelor party weekend. That assignment led me into my photo archives and my fuzzy memory bank – a brain full of feelings and sweeping impressionistic ideas that combine many specific experiences into a colorful haze. In the poorly organized photo files on my laptop, I saw color palettes that now feel like home but were recently impossible to imagine. The pinks and tans of the Sonoran, the wild oranges of Canyon Country, the deep blues and greens of the San Juans, the silvers of grasses in range-and-basin country gone dry. These are the colors of my world, a world that once seemed at risk of losing all color.

Condensing the narrative arc from lost and almost dead to curiously wandering in a way that transcends being “lost” or “found” brought perspective to how much things can change if you wait long enough for flowers to bloom again… and again. In the weeds, waiting for tomorrow– let alone next monsoon season– can feel excruciating. From above, zoomed out and riding thermal winds to fairer weather, the interconnectivity of all life becomes more obvious. As I click through twenty slides in six minutes, I watch a slice of life flash before my eyes, the progression of a soul starving for something I couldn’t even name to a soul satiated, finally aware of what it’s craved all along.

In our increasingly unstable climate, some flowers skip certain years of blooming, while others are slowly migrating to different regions than what we’ve long considered their native ranges.

I, too, have slowly migrated to different regions than what might be considered my native range, if such a thing can exist for an ambling mutt byproduct of a colonized nation. I ache for the deciduous canopies of the Ozarks as surely as I am born again under the cloudless skies of the Sonoran Desert. On a perfect July day in Colorado’s High Country I can live an entire lifetime in the rapid-fire cycle from columbine superbloom to life-threatening lightning storm. When I try a new Himalayan restaurant in some far-flung town, I find in each subtly different preparation a level of distinction that my past taste buds could never fathom. As the desert cycles through its seasons, I notice the behavior of its critters change in subtle ways that require intimate knowledge of this prickly place. In everything, there’s a newness and a familiarity that conspire to give life its color. They say that variety is the spice of life, but it can be difficult to conceptualize what “spice” really means until you’ve sampled flavors beyond what the mind could imagine in a sterilized vacuum.