arizona Archives

The Spa is Mine

The Spa is Mine.

It’s a small claim, but it feels true in that quiet way—when the water is glassy, the sky is a clean, wide blue, and the whole yard looks like it’s holding its breath. The pool sits there like a bright square of calm, bordered by sun-warmed concrete and a strip of green that looks too orderly to be accidental.

From this chair, with my legs stretched out and a book open in my lap, the day becomes simple. There’s no rush to get in, no need to prove anything. Just the soft sound of water shifting against tile, and the steady light that makes everything look a little newer than it is.

I like how places can feel lived alongside you. Not loud, not demanding—just present. A backyard can be a kind of home for your thoughts, the way an old house can hold seasons in its walls. Out here, summer doesn’t announce itself; it settles in.

Maybe that’s all “mine” means today: a brief pocket of stillness, claimed without conflict. A moment where nothing is being remodeled, improved, optimized, or explained. Just a body in the sun, a page turning, and water waiting patiently nearby.

Rain Dance for Arizona on Bell Rock Trail

The sky over Sedona looked heavy, the kind of gray that can’t decide if it’s going to give you shade or finally give you rain.

On Bell Rock Trail, the red earth felt wide and open, stretched out like a stage. I stood there with my arms thrown up, half-joking, half-hopeful, doing my best rain dance for Arizona. The rocks held their rust color under the clouds, and the whole desert seemed to pause and listen.

Hiking out here has a way of making you pay attention to small shifts: wind changing direction, a cooler breath of air, the way distant buttes fade when mist drifts through. It’s not the same as a summer storm back home, where rain arrives loud and certain. This was more like a question hanging in the sky.

I don’t know if the dance worked. Maybe it’s enough that it made me stop and look around, to feel how big the landscape is and how quiet you can get inside it. Even when the ground is dry, you can still sense what it’s waiting for.

If you’ve ever walked Bell Rock Trail under a brooding sky, you know the feeling: that the desert isn’t empty at all. It’s just patient.

The two most beautiful thing this weekend in one photo

There are weekends that feel too big to hold in your hands, so you try to press them flat into something simple—one frame, one breath, one small proof that you were there.

In this photo, the red rocks sit under a heavy sky, muted by cloud and distance, the way landmarks do when you’re not trying to conquer them—only notice them. Below, rows of clay-colored roofs and soft green trees make their own quiet pattern, a lived-in grid at the edge of the wild.

And then there’s the other beautiful thing: the small human moment in front of all that ancient stone. Someone leaning in with a phone, framing the same view, saving it the way we all do now. Not to replace the memory, but to give it a place to live when the weekend is over.

I like how the scene holds two kinds of scale at once—the patient, unmoving rock and the quick, fleeting act of photographing it. The world pushes up against itself: wilderness and neighborhood, weather and weekend, permanence and a thumb tapping a screen.

Maybe that’s what makes the best trips feel settled instead of crowded. You don’t take the landscape home. You just let it follow you a little, like color on your sleeves.