The Color of Hope

palo verde tree

palo verde thorn

trunk of a palo verde tree

Sometimes in the forgetting places of our lives, we need to be reminded of the powerful need to hang onto hope. I learned something this week about the palo verde tree here in the desert. I know, I know, what's all that exciting about a green-barked tree? I don't know about you, but I love discovering the surrounding messages God that he uses to spread life and hope. This is one such message--the color of hope -- found in the bark of a tree.

Although only 5:30 a.m., I park my vehicle in the final spot at the trailhead at South Mountain. Bikers, cross country school teams, and marathon runners are taking advantage of the less-than-100-degree morning to get in their workouts.

I head for Pima Wash, a 1-mile trail through loose sand shaded by the banks of the arroyo. A female quail calls from the branches of a dead tree, the plume on her head bobbing with each note. A male joins her as they simultaneously turn to the east to sing the morning song.

A cactus wren lands on the top of a saguaro, bragging a King-Of-The-Cactus chorus as his tail flicks in time with his music.

It has been three weeks since I hit the trails, having avoided them during an excessive heat advisory that swept through the desert in mid-June. My legs are rusty. The only way to lubricate them is to allow the sweat to flow as I climb out of the wash up the Beverly Canyon Trail to the Ridgeline Trail.

I am thankful for the hazy clouds blocking the sun.

The wildflowers are all gone. As is the red cactus fruit atop the saguaros. The hope of a future is dried up. Spent.

I pass a palo verde. The tree is only branches and green bark with each twig terminating in a thorn. The palo verde lives up to it's Spanish translation of "green stick," having tossed aside all it's leaves in the heat.

The leaves are spent so the tree can survive the drought of summer.

It is the rhythm of the desert.

Spring and summer. Sunrise and sunset.

Clouds hiding and clouds breaking open. Fruit and dormancy. Activity and rest.

Writer Adam C McHugh ponders in The Listening Life: "The drama that plays out in [nature] so often parallels and even affects the drama that acts in us. Perhaps the seasons are a lesson book for the soul, instructing us when to move fast and when to slow down, when to act and when to rest, when to focus on the world outside and when to hibernate and go down deep. (page 121).

Summer in the desert is the rhythm of going deep.

I am learning this lesson. I am trying to embrace this truth for I have known the spending. The thorns. The casting off of leaves in drought. I have been the bare stick. The one without hope.

And you? How about you?

Brittle? Used up? Barely hanging on?

Let me remind you (and remind myself!) of this reality in case you are in the forgetting season of no moisture. Of no rain. Of unending heat. Of standing stripped bare.

Even in the scorching sun, the bark of the palo verde remains green.

The tree does not cast off the color of hope.

Let me repeat that. The tree does not cast off the color of hope.

And more than that.

According to the Arizona Desert Sonora Museum, if you would cut into the trunk of a palo verde, you would discover no growth rings. The tree does not record in its trunk the years of drought it has experienced.

Only life.

Cut into a palo verde and that's all you get.

Life. Hope.

Surrounded by green.

The promise of a future.

The promise of a drought ending.

The promise of not always being a bare stick.

The promise of hope.