Desert Bloom: On surprise, resilience, and the life hiding inside change
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A surprising find along a hike in Canyonlands National Park. A desert in bloom. |
Dear Empowered Reader,
I wasn't expecting to be moved by a desert.
My husband and I visited Arches and Canyonlands National Parks earlier this spring. I have visited the Parks before in summer and have seen photos of the parks, of course. But on each hike, I kept thinking: I did not expect this much life here.
That surprise turned into a question I've been sitting with. And I think it has something to say about where you and I are right now, in this season of change and renewal. What the desert actually taught me was a lesson in change.
I expected a desert and red rock landscape. The first lesson I got was a lesson in geology, that the rocks are still moving.
Here's what I didn't know before I went: the arches don't just sit there. They're forming right now. And they're falling. The same forces that build them, water seeping into cracks, salt shifting far below the surface, freeze-thaw cycles expanding and contracting rock over thousands of years are also, slowly, bringing them down. For example, the Wall Arch collapsed in 2008. The park has lost several arches in recorded history alone. And yet, the desert around the collapse was not diminished. It was just different. The rubble became part of the story. The opening in the rock became space for something else to grow.
The arches exist because of pressure, not in spite of it. The same force that threatens to break the rock is the one shaping something worth seeing.
The thing that really stayed with me was the salt. Deep below Arches and Canyonlands, there's an ancient salt layer, Paradox Formation, geologists call it, that's been shifting for 300 million years. That underground movement is what buckled the Colorado Plateau upward, creating the conditions for all those towers and fins and arches. The drama you see on the surface starts with something you can't see at all.
I stood there thinking: that's not so different from us. |
A view of Double Arch in Arches National Park. |
The second lesson was that the desert blooms. I didn't expect to see as many wildflowers as I did. Spring in the desert is brief and it doesn't announce itself. You have to be there for it. Desert bloom happens because of a combination of moisture, temperature, and timing that doesn't come together every year. Some seeds wait in the soil for years before the conditions are right. They don't force it. They read the season and then they go.
There's something about that I find genuinely steadying. The capacity to bloom was always there. The flower wasn't failing during the dry years, it was waiting for alignment.
Connecting it to our own lives. We're in spring (in the Northern Hemisphere). For many of us, that means transition, in our work, our relationships, our sense of what comes next. Spring is not a gentle season, actually. It's turbulent. Temperatures swing. Ice and warmth compete. Things that looked dormant start moving in ways that feel uncertain.
The desert showed me that transformation has its own timeline. The arches didn't form quickly. The salt underneath was moving for millions of years before the landscape responded. And when an arch falls, it doesn't mean the desert has failed, it means the geology is still working.
What would it mean to hold your own transitions that way? Not as evidence that something is broken, but as the process of something taking shape?
Research on resilience backs this up. A 2022 study in the Journal of Positive Psychology found that people who described their difficult experiences in geological or natural-process terms , slow, layered, inevitable reported greater self-compassion and lower anxiety than those who framed change as crisis. Our metaphors matter. They shape how we move through things.
Reflection questions for April
Where in your life are you in a "forming" phase, pressure applied, shape not yet visible?
Is there something you've been waiting for conditions to be right to begin? What would "right" actually need to look like?
What's one thing that looked like loss or collapse in your recent past that created space for something new?
What's your "underground salt layer", the deep, unseen thing that's been quietly shaping your surface?
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A sight I wasn't expecting to see, Cottonwood trees in bloom. |
This month's practice is simple: go look for life where you don't expect it.
That might be literally a walk where you notice what's growing in the cracks of pavement, or what's blooming early.
Or it might be figurative, looking at a hard conversation, a slow project, or an uncertain relationship and asking: what might be forming here that I can't fully see yet?
Keep a note in your phone or a small journal. Just a sentence a day. What surprised you? Where did you find aliveness when you weren't looking for it?
Build it up over the month. You may find that you've been standing in the middle of a desert bloom and didn't know it yet.
An Affirmation:
"I trust the layers I cannot see. I am part of a process longer than any single season. I bloom when conditions align, and I hold my ground in the dry years." |
One of the many inspiring viewpoints during our trip. |
The best moments of the whole trip were standing at the various overlooks and viewpoints of the Park. The vastness and beauty are hard to describe. My husband and I didn't say much as we hiked from point to point because there wasn't much to say; we just had to experience it.
Sometimes what we most need isn't more information or a better plan.
Sometimes we need to stand in front of something ancient and remember that we are part of a very long, slow, still-unfolding story.
I hope April brings you some of that. And if you're in a dry season,
I hope you can trust that the bloom is already inside you, waiting for its moment.
A huge thank you to my sister, Joan Zaruba, for gifting this issue's poem. Her words capture something so true about the journey that the summit is earned step by step, in good company, and the view at the top makes every hard stretch worth it. It's a perfect reflection of what Regenerate Your World is all about. I'm so grateful to have her alongside me, on the trail and in life.
Take care, dear reader, Julie Zaruba Fountaine
Founder, Empower Possible
Questions, reflections, or moments of your own desert bloom? Write to me: info@empowerpossible.com
Empower Possible · Newsletter No. 106 · April 27, 2026
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Not So Far Not So Far by Joan Zaruba |
the summit looked so far away we started walking anyway sometimes we spoke laughing and teasing sometimes we fell silent looking and listening sometimes we needed a brief rest sip of cool water granola snack pulled from a pack then back to the hike walking and walking as the trail ascended navigating rocks and sand one step and then another until we looked up and realized we made it to the summit where we started looked so far away from where we now stood thrilled with ourselves and the view happy to have made it there, together the rock never looked so red the sky, so blue as it did from that desert summit view
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