Elephant Arch, Cactus Fruit, and The Curve of God

elephant-arch

elephant-arch

elephant arch in morning light

The eastern sky adorned itself in swaths of peach and violet in preparation for the sun's arrival upon the peaks of the surrounding mountains. The deepening blue marbled with gray as the light increased, drawing out the silhouettes of saguaros that had--only moments before--been one solid mass of shadows.

Watching our odometer and the surrounding cliffs, we searched for a break to our left in the high-walled canyon.

"There it is!" I exclaimed.

"Where?" Kevin asked, slowing our vehicle.

"See that saguaro? Follow it back to where the light is just hitting. I see the trunk."

He looked for several moments in the early morning light for the rock behemoth. "Ah. There." Satisfaction was in his voice. We had arrived at elephant arch, a side trip on our day of adventuring in the Superstitions.

My husband has this thing for arches, so much so, that I gave him a book on the subject this past Christmas, complete with a note about going on future adventures together. According to the book, Windstone, by David Muench, "To be classified as an arch...an opening must be at least three feet wide and appear in a continuous wall of rock."

Elephant Arch fulfilled both criteria.

I must admit there is something about a large opening in stone that invites an explorer--even a one-day adventurer--to want to investigate. To sit under. To crawl through. To wonder at the curved architectural design.

And, of course, to take a photo.

Knowing it was a short jaunt, we left our gear in the car, as we scrambled up a nonexistent trail toward the arch. Mollie, our retriever/terrier, had gone less than one hundred yards when she stopped and lifted her right front paw. Stuck in her fur was a clump of cactus--a fuzzy, three-inch piece of cholla. Having left the cactus-ridding pliers and old comb in the car (great for flicking off cactus), I found two short sticks to extract the offending hitchhiker before we continued our ascent.

Cholla was not the only cactus in residence. With the giant saguaros in the background, I also passed the antler-shaped staghorn, the flat beaver-tailed prickly pear, and the spindly ocotillo. It's as if we had stepped into a cactus garden, with a cross-section of all the major types present.

Looking ahead at my destination, I almost missed it: a tiny fishhook or pincushion cactus dwarfed by the company of taller relatives in his home in the shadow of a boulder, a micro-climate of shade in the harsh environment. The pincushion cactus spouted one curved red fruit, as small as a macaroni noodle.

Curved stone. Curved cactus fruit.

I hiked up the remaining distance to join Kevin under the arching rock. We took photos from several angles, framing the final picture among the towering saguaros of the elephant arch's curved trunk, made all the more prominent by the sun-drenched mountains in the background.

The book on arches reminds the reader that "the arch shape is an elemental one in nature. Wherever you look, trees bend into arches; water arches over falls; rainbows arch over the earth."

And arches appear in ice. And stone. And cactus fruit.

While the author in Windstone points to nature, I can't help but wonder if the creator chooses the arch again and again because there is a roundness to God. A curve. He is not all black and white. All points and angles and straight lines.

Some of the math of God is round. Encircling. Inviting.

His is the Father-heart that watches on roads for prodigals to make the U-turn home.

For the wanderers and the bewildered to meander their way back.

To come full-circle.

To return to Him.

To the roundness of His love.*

I want to seek shelter in His curve.

*Thank you to Luci Shaw in Thumbprint in the Clay for this phrase. Page 140.

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