For six years, we tended to them—my husband and I—two beautiful thread agaves, potted outside our adobe front door, nestled on either side of the entry like silent guardians. They sat inside a small courtyard among bougainvillea and hummingbirds, enclosed by a Santa Fe blue gate and an adobe wall. Their spiky, lizard-green thorns were built for the relentless desert heat.

In the spring of last year, one of them began blooming. A towering flowering spike emerged, its diameter as wide as a flute, spiraling upward effortlessly. It climbed with ambition, surpassing our roofline and stretching toward the sky. At its peak—perhaps ten, maybe eleven feet—it erupted into clusters of tiny pods, each one unfurling into triumphant blossoms.

Hummingbirds and bees flocked to this towering bloom, and we marveled at its radiance and power.

Simultaneously, as the flowering stalk thrived, the agave herself was dying. Her once-powerful, electric-green claws dried and turned yellow.

She stood proud even as her life force visibly drained, her shape resembling flames or the headdress of a sacred shamanic elder. All of her energy, her very essence, was given to the magnificent ten-foot bloom. The two were connected—she at the base, the bloom in exaltation, reaching toward the sun. Fused together as one. It reminded me of a mother and child.

If I’m really honest, after nearly two years of breastfeeding at that time (now close to three), I’d look at her and say, “I feel you.” I felt like she and I shared a secret understanding of the devotion of mothering.

Two months passed as the towering stalk stood high, until the bloom, too, began to curl inward toward itself and dry out in the sun.

As winter began, I came home one afternoon and found them lying in our garden together—mother and child. The agave and her bloom lay there, the roots perfectly detached, a clean cut.

All through the winter and into the new year, I kept the dried agave and stalk—mother and son—outside our home in the courtyard. I couldn’t imagine letting them go. They felt like my allies, my friends.

Over this past weekend, on Imbolc—the ancient Celtic festival marking the midpoint between winter and spring, a time of renewal and returning light—on a warm, bright day, my husband and I worked in the yard, and I got a nudge that it was time to give the agave and blossom back to the earth. I prepared to cut her into pieces for the compost, but as I separated the dried bloom from the dried plant, I just couldn’t part with this wild, spiky star mother. I turned to my husband and declared, “She’s got to stay with us.” I brought her inside and placed her on a shelf in the living room, where we could marvel at and celebrate her daily.

Then, as I cut the dried blooms, I shook them. Inside, the hardened seeds rattled. A eureka moment—we trimmed the bloom into three pieces, and they became rattles, perfect for the live music that flows through our house daily. The remaining dried stalk, thick like bamboo, we cut into two smaller pieces for our son—two “microphones.”

Because in this house, anything—and I mean anything—a fork, a chopstick, a spoon, a metal rod from our furniture—is a microphone in waiting for our almost three-year-old baby musician son.

I envisioned the beautiful mother star bloom watching over her child in delight as he multiplied into instruments for music—the shimmering vibration of sound and love. I experienced a profound joy rippling through me, a soul satisfaction, feeling I had done right by her, right by life.

I heard the spirit of the agave whisper to me, “The Universe is music, Alice. Can you hear it? We are all voices singing together—the one song.”