The Parable of the Palo Verde and the Hummingbird

Why do I feel constriction in my chest when I think about staying? I think I feel it because it feels hard, hard to commit to a place, to actually plant down my roots, to be ok without a hundred options fluttering around, those freedom birds floating on the breeze of possibilities.

It is hard to plant myself, to be both the gardener and the tree, the shovel and the sapling, the hole and the roots.

Part of me wants to stay put. I know, rationally, it makes sense. Studies have shown that community is one of the most important parts of this messy, human experience. I know this, as I fly off toward the horizon, chasing beauty etched in my faraway imagination; I know flying inevitably tugs on rooting. I’m stretching, and my roots need water. Ironic, isn’t it, to consider letting them grow into the desert soil. Water is scarce, and the horizon all the more expansive. But I do already have a grove of family trees here with me.

If I were to be one of many desert trees right now, I’d be a palo verde. Palo verdes, their sage green skin in full yellow regalia this late springtime, grow slowly. They stretch their scratchy limbs into the sky at their own pace, and as those branches grow, they can better become home to nests, to the holes of woodpeckers, to blossoms. They provide shade for others. They learn what it means to protect a budding seed in the late winter so it can unfold into a cape of golden blossoms come April. Like all trees, the palo verde knows loss, but that nothing is lost forever. Their blossoms will come and go, grow and fall, and the cycle will begin again. A palo verde is patience, and trust.

There’s strength in being still as the seasons change around me, and as the seasons change me.

If I were to be a bird, I would be a hummingbird, a red-breasted sparkle of light who moves so fast you can barely see her. I would become the movement, able to fly anywhere. Perhaps to Colombia, to Southeast Asia, to Scotland or Spain. To the stars and the sun. Most hummingbirds, according to Aztec tradition, are chasing the sun. Hummingbirds were known by the Aztecs as messengers between the human plane and one of the sun gods, Huitzilopochtli. They were fallen warriors, resurrected from the south, to light the way. But perhaps I would be drawn to the moon. A lunar hummingbird, trying to better understand the face in her glow, the shadows of her cheeks, the sound of her moondreams. The aspiration of perpetual temptation–to chase a moon is to chase a never-ending cycle.

The palo verde or the hummingbird. The palo verde and the hummingbird. The fear and the gift of choice. If I let my root-feet grow down deep, I can’t move; at least, not nearly as quickly. Staying still makes me vulnerable. But flying, that, too, is risky. To be a plaything to the whimsies of the breeze. To lose sight of what’s below. Which one scares me more right now?

When we feel fear, that’s when we know we’re being asked to be brave.

I used to fear the movement, and that’s how I knew I had to fly. I followed a dream of moving to a new place, a new country, a new community. I moved in with a lover and learned relationship deeper. I taught other teachers and published a magazine and spoke in Spanish and conducted interviews that flowed with that Latin lisp of mine. I was voracious in my pursuit of working for National Geographic. I bought a bike and went to new places, changed tires on my own, felt limitless. And then, I shifted. I found courage to leave, to love again, to live on a ranch, to work with college students, to stumble and say the wrong thing so many times.

I became the movement, and began to fear the stillness. Stillness makes me ask: what would I be, who would I be, if I wasn’t always moving onto the next adventure?

I’m scared that if I stay, I won’t leave. I won’t be able to leave. I’ll become routine and robotic, dreaming about the past in a way that idolizes what was magical, that erases what felt temporary, and unsettling. I’m scared I’ll become a lesser version of myself, not pushing myself to new limits of travel and interviews, of discomfort and new edges.

But not all journeys are far. In fact, the most profound are deep. They are right here, like the palo verde bud bursting into a flower, like a hummingbird sitting still at sunset. I can’t forget the things I’ve seen and heard, I can’t forget who I was in different places at different times, because they’re all a part of me. In a way, there were already a part of me before I even left. A man in India once told me,

“Everybody goes to the gurus to ask for wisdom, and what do they all say? ‘Seek thyself.’ When you realize that, really realize it, you know that you already know everything you need to. You’ve known it all along.”

I know how to start a garden. Water the roots to grow the trunk, to stretch the branches, to become the blossoms. Just like I know how a baby bird learns to fly. Waddle slowly on a limb. Flap those wings. Strengthen them. Learn how to differentiate the dirt of the ground from the wind of the sky. Root and soar; fall and fly.

Courage is falling and failing. It happens when one is living.

Tenderly rooting the soil here, this scratchy brown chalk of desert sand, I suppose no matter what happens, I feel courageous. In preparation for what’s next, I have to be fully here, for the time that I am. To tend to my roots, to cultivate more blossoms, to soak up the sunshine.

And the next time I go flying, wherever and however that will be, I’ll have a heavier body to carry with me. Good. The wind won’t be able to blow me quite as hard. I’ll better be able to withstand the storms, and my internal compass will be that much more fine-tuned. I’ll be nourished on the sapling stuff that matters most–that sweet, sticky, sour, sunny, soil-y compost of it all, and…

my roots will grow into my wings.

I’ll not just have places to go, but places to return. People new and people old. An input and an output. A sharing. The palo verde grows up, and the hummingbird weaves its cornucopia nest under one of the long, thin branches. The two depend on one another, in symbiosis, in memory, in possibility.

I root so I grow, I grow so I move, I move so I stay. And so the cycle continues.