Three deer grazed in the forest behind my house, skittish but hungry. One headed for the penstemon flowers growing in our yard, but seeing Mike and me, and Kelly the (unthreatening) Labrador, opted out. A yellow swallowtail butterfly was briefly trapped under the shade shelter on the patio, fighting the winds that signal yet another red flag warning....
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It occurred to me when I saw the babushka tottering toward me on the sidewalk that she most likely did not understand the large English words on the front of her T-shirt: BLOW ME. What I immediately wanted was to make eye contact with someone nearby, someone like-minded whose look would fleetingly telegraph they thought this as odd and destabilizing as I...
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Some months ago when the preparation for my new exhibition at the Museum of Northern Arizona was beginning, my friend and brother of a lighter shade, glassblower George Averbeck, approached me with the idea of collaborating on a piece for the museum gala auction. In our continuing support for this fine institution, I readily agreed. George has shown his...
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I threaded my way out of Doney Park along dusty roads lined with lush patches of feral rye grass heavy with seed heads. The trim coopers hawk watched from its perch above on the phone wire for the mice gathering for the harvest. Plump prairie dogs stood at alert as I passed. They are too big for the coopers hawk to manage, but red tails and northern...
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It is a leisurely spring evening on the Kane Ranch front porch and the doves are moaning away in a chorus of mournful harmonies. But there is nothing sorrowful about the golden hour in Marble Canyon. The horizon is a wide, panoramic expanse stretching for miles. Here you can look and look and fill your head with the possibility of anything. A desert spiny...
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Vacation planning always feels like such a hopeful thing to do. We’ve been working all week to prepare to leave. Mike’s built a fabulous platform/storage box for our new-to-us vehicle. I’ve been working at my desk so I can leave with a clear conscience. At last, we’re nearly there. I’m in that halcyonic state of having only a few last minute things to do,...
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It is May, and I’ve been away from Flagstaff for five months. It is our longest separation since I moved to town nine years ago. Most days I move through this yearlong decampment to Kyrgyzstan bustling with purpose and the rational understanding that this time away from home is temporary. I remember why I thought it was a solid idea to leave my community,...
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Once again, I am honored with a full show at the Museum of Northern Arizona. The show begins with a gala with all the trimmings on Summer Solstice. It is a place all artists sharing this universal language wish to be. I am humbled by this distinction and I know it is my stories of being an integral part of my land that brings me here. I gladly share these...
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Some time ago I stopped by Smokey Bear’s office in the Department of Agriculture in Washington, D.C., and I said, “Hey Smokey! Aren’t you tired of holding down a desk? Why don’t you come out to Arizona and work in the woods again.” He didn’t commit, and the winter passed, and about the time Fisher Point started smoking this spring I got a text message that...
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April is the cruelest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain. Winter kept us warm, covering Earth in forgetful snow, feeding A little life with dried tubers. – From The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot If you were to sit on the small limestone hill in back of my childhood home on an April morn...
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A home movie of my sister Dana, taken sometime around 1967, shows her enthusiastically hunting Easter eggs in our backyard in Springfield, Va. Her 6-year-old self is wearing her pink Easter dress, pink Mary Janes and a navy blue straw hat. Captured by my dad on film with his Brownie Fun Saver movie camera, she was so full of joy, and watching her leap like...
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Fifty years ago, the Civil Rights Act was signed by President Lyndon Johnson, Beatlemania was in full bloom, a first-class stamp cost a nickel, and Ford rolled out the Mustang. I was seven. Fifty years ago the top stories in my life were becoming a first grader at St. Francis of Assisi School and the debut of the NBC television show Flipper. First grade...
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Aaah, the rites of Spring! Yaa’ Daa’n. This is the time of year when smiling hearts blossom everywhere it seems. I used to see it in the early thunderheads looming high above the parched grounds of the government boarding school compound. There seemed to be newness even in the gray geometry we called home away from our sheep camp homes. Like the towering...
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I collect trees. That grove of oaks out A-1 Mountain Road, the grandmother juniper beside a trail north of town, the biggest aspen of them all on the west slope of the Peaks and the trees that lean over the St. George River in Maine to drop golden leaves each fall. And the mulberry I climbed when I was a child in Phoenix. And the one I call My Tree, a...
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“There’s a friendly tie of some sort between music and eating.” – Thomas Hardy, Under the Greenwood Tree I’m doing a ride along with Emma Kate, my eldest granddaughter, as we shop for dinner supplies in sleepy San Felipe. She’s very focused on the task at hand. She has had her learner’s permit for about a week and we’ve planned some serious windshield time...
Read MoreA guest post by Peter Friederici The deer out along the tracks has almost entirely vanished. About three months ago it was fresh—if that’s the term for something that smelled like death. Recent death, the kind of odor to provoke a brief shocked worry that I might stumble on one of the transients who come out here to drink or sleep it off. But no, there lay...
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When I was in third grade, my grandmother and I began writing letters to one another. She lived with a smelly dachshund in a cottage on Mobile Bay in southern Alabama. I was her oldest grandchild growing up in a swarm of siblings in south Florida. I can’t recall the contours of her face with much clarity, but in the eye of my mind I can see her looping...
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They rode hard with intensity upon their Palomino steed. They sat in their saddles with confidence, synchronized as they moved through brushes and deadfalls. The Horse and his Cowboy. They were overwhelming there up on the movie screen. Their hats disturbed not in the slightest by the wind they often rode into. They squinted hard and narrow into the storm...
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We both like tea in the morning and wine in the evening. We both talk into handheld radios in the summer: she on the volunteer ambulance squad in a little town in northwest Connecticut, I on a fire lookout near Flagstaff. We’re both likely to delight and probably call each other if we hear a canyon wren in an unexpected place. But, unlike those pairs of...
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Follow me down a dirt road bordered by barbed wire fences under a 1950s blue sky. My feet are bare and I’m shirtless and I sing with great feeling, “Where have all the flowers gone long time passing? Where have all the flowers gone long time ago?” A deep ravine cuts across the widow Blanton’s pecan grove and goes under the farm road by our mailbox. In the...
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When my husband Mike and I moved to Flagstaff in 1986, the town was sweet, but somewhat shabby. It was most certainly not the happening place it is these days. We temporarily rented a house out by the old fire station just west of Cosnino Road, then bought a house near the intersection of Fourth Street and Lockett Avenue. Our local grocery was the Bayless...
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Water is my mother tongue. I grew up on a flat patch of landfill just north of Palm Beach called Singer Island, a place named after the 23rd child of Isaac Singer, the sewing machine millionaire. My family lived a blemish-free, resolutely middle-class life two blocks from the Atlantic Ocean. What I remember most about my childhood is the milky blue-green...
Read More“… aa’de’h, ha ho dil ya, bi’ daa de. Tsin, t’iis, noseel,i’ be’ ya’ bi’ne’ es tsi jinni’. Da’ hoodi dsi, da hodi’ zhoosh go’ da hode’ knii’de’e’ daa’ ho,l dziil’ jinni.” “… on the cusp of creation, trees, and all that takes root ties down the undulating restlessness of the Mother. stillness with prayers, that is the wisdom and strength of grandparents …”...
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Feeling overwhelmed by distances recently, I parked my truck on Mars Hill where I could see the plateau as a game board instead of a web of gas-sucking, spine-sagging miles. A train snaked through downtown. Mormon Mountain hibernated with blue-shouldered grace. A half-hour of perspective from above nudged my glum mood a bit. It could be I was TOO...
Read MoreThere was a time after the Civil War when a person might leave the country on short order with no explanation. Folks would often say they had “Gone to Texas.” When my grandfather left Crane Creek, Ill. he did go to Texas. I feel as though 2013 grabbed me by the scruff of the neck and shook me like a terrier shakes a rat. Health problems and issues beyond...
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What is this book? What is anything? Who am I? Who are you? Stop it. Forget it. This quote on the front of my current journal is a direct lift from the inside flap of Maira Kalman’s book, The Principles of Uncertainty, in which Kalman gives equal treatment to trash cans and flower arrangements, bedrooms and bathrooms, and the hats, coats and shoes of...
Read MoreThe solstice has arced through and left its promises of light and longer days. Christmas, Boxing Day and Hanukkah are in the past tense, and once again we inch our way toward the trailhead of another year. I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’m done with the resolution business. All those lists taped to the fridge, the scoldy shoulds hidden beneath...
Read MoreCelebrations of the season began way before Christmas as I know it now. Before the lighted trees, gifts and Santa Claus. There were times remembered in events and emotions. There was a sense of holiness that comes with the hibernations of animals and the loss of warmth, as the world became more surreal suspended farther from the Sun. The short days and...
Read MoreOne year I made up a story to help a friend and I complete a walk. We’d left her car near a ranch at one end of a desert canyon and taken my truck to a side drainage to walk back through and have a day outdoors together. Even with ice at the edges of pools, the full sun and a cozy warmth with lunch on a big slab of granite made it a classic Arizona...
Read MoreIn my childhood home there were not two matching pieces of furniture. There was a random assortment of straight back wooden chairs and shapeless overstuffed chairs covered with large floral patterns. There was a stout table of dark wood joined to an under shelf with narrow uprights like a picket fence on three sides. It had been made by my...
Read MoreThe four of us stood on the porch admiring the last glimmers of light on thunderheads over the Echo Cliffs. A few moments later, the moon rose from behind those same clouds taking our collective breath away. This is a fact: at Kane Ranch the contrasts often leave me breathless, sighing over light and dark, or gasping aloud at something I never even...
Read MoreI’m not alone. There are others out there, but we’re a formless group with no T-shirts, no password, no secret handshake. We don’t have a 12-step program, a 10k run to fund research for our cause or celebrity endorsements. We live among you, as unseen by others as we can be to ourselves. We’re misunderstood, often misidentified,...
Read MoreDo you enjoy details of Arizona land and lore? Here is a quiz for you: where is Doyle’s Saddle? Why is there a Sharlot Hall Museum in Prescott? If you are sitting on the porch at Kane Ranch, what cliffs glow with end–of-day light? Ok, so you have walked up the Weatherford Trail, and been down to play or listen to folk music in Prescott, and if you’ve...
Read MoreSap oozes from a sweet vanilla pine. Its scent rides the morning current. Nectar of hummingbird plant, (Da’yii t,ii Daa’) still on my tongue and cliff roses fragrance in my senses. We ride the morning roads upon this land of many incredible moods, many fascinating plays of light and the space. It has its own vocabulary. The land of my ancestors once spoke...
Read MoreOn the wall of my sunroom hang two portraits. In one a small girl leans forward and raven hair cascades forward in heavy ropes to frame her face. She is about 6 years old. She clutches a circular disk of beadwork to her breast and her eyes are closed as though she were praying. The coarse woven blanket that forms the background is patterned with bold...
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It’s morning. Dense fog rises off the river in the valley below, though the sky is clear. Drops of moisture diffuse the sunlight; the traffic sounds are muffled. The daylight burns off the fog, but sometimes not until noon. Everything seems to take longer, moving through the dampness. The trees are ghostly and unfamiliar. The wall heater kicks on just...
Read MoreI must have been in my late 20s when my mom and I started playing Scrabble together. Even though I fancied myself a wordsmith and trafficked in language for a living, I was a listless and half-hearted player, intimidated by my mom’s skill. To distance myself from the possibility I might not do well, I mocked the game. Goofy little tiles and point scoring:...
Read MoreThe morning alarm goes off early, blaring harshly as we stumble out of our bunk beds at the boarding school. Another morning. The overseer swaggers in with his switch tapping his calves. He yells down the hallway echoing the unkind sound of the bell. We line up in our pajamas for inspection and a head count; 60 young boys in a wing of the massive...
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As certainly as yellow creeps down the sides of the mountain where groves of aspens change daily, I feel my thoughts creeping away from the duty hours of looking for fires. Now I imagine distant adventures. For five years I’ve started winter by spending October in Maine in the small house my mother was born in. It belongs to me now and little old houses...
Read MoreRoute 66 has a million stories to tell, some funny some poignant. My first real road trip was hitchhiking from Baltimore to L.A. in 1969. Most of those miles I logged on Route 66, the Mother Road. It was an education of the first order. I just walked out to the highway with an army surplus pack on my back and stuck my thumb in the air. For years after, in...
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What if bridges – your only connection with the outside world – washed away in a torrential rainstorm and the ensuing floodwaters? What if the Colorado River ran muddy as the Mississippi from the Glen Canyon Dam down to the Little Colorado River? How resilient could you be? The river did just that this past week, as the sands picked up by Wahweap Creek...
Read MoreMy first diary was a shared one; I must have been 8 or 9. My best friend, Andrea, and I had one of those palm-sized starter diaries for girls with a pink cover, a cheap lock and a faint impression of Tinkerbell in the bottom corner of every page. We made only one entry: the Webster’s Dictionary definition of penis. With my unmoored handwriting, I copied...
Read MoreIt is often said that it takes a village to raise a child. I know that it takes an army of teachers to make that child a productive and giving member of society. I am such a child still. I can never say enough of my traditional Dineh elders who taught me before I stepped into a classroom. The elders still hold that position in our lives as we also take on...
Read MoreAs a fire lookout on a local peak, I am thanked many times each season for doing what I know how to do: sit quietly, look, notice detail, pay attention, respond effectively. That’s the work. I appreciate you all paying your income taxes that support my federal job to turn in smokes and read books. I appreciate the miracle of years of such employment in my...
Read MoreThis may look easy, but it’s not. It’s hard. Coming up with a fresh new subject for the old “Letter from Home” column … I start writing and I get a few paragraphs into it and it’s looking really promising then a small voice says, “You wrote about that in 2008.” Or, I start with a flourish and then fade quickly with nary a point or conclusion in sight. The...
Read MoreThe road construction crews at Lee’s Ferry have signs posted along the road indicating where it’s safe for them to pull out with their heavy construction equipment: TURN AROUND. Lacking the hyphen to make it a noun, I read it as an imperative: GET OUT WHILE YOU STILL CAN. The message was clearly meant for me that particular day.
Read MoreI was indentured at the University of Florida when I saw an ad in our campus newspaper looking for marketing managers for some unspecified “family focused” entertainment business. The ad promised the trifecta: travel, independence and big bucks. Well, big to me. I was a breakfast waitress in a restaurant lined with aquariums that smelled like dead fish....
Read More“How did you get to where you are now, and How can I get there?” I am often posed this question from young artists. Some days I do look about me and pose the same question. It seems like it was not that long ago that I was listening intently for sheep bells and nestled inside big sagebrushes with comic books. It seems only days ago I felt the hot wind on...
Read MoreA bolt sizzles between the fire tower and my truck 100 yards away. A thick lump of smoke wafts across the steep road. My eyes widen at sound and shape exploding in the woods. Though I’ve seen hundreds of bolts in 20 seasons, I am astonished. From my wooden chair I peer out the west window trying to see into the draw where lightning has once again not hit...
Read MoreLook! There along the shoulder of Silver Saddle Road, growing in golden abundance between the brome grass and rabbit brush, are feral fingers of rye, reaching from Doney Park’s past into today’s drier reality. It’s been 50 years since rye was planted as a cover crop for dry-farmed corn, bean and potato fields to keep the soil from blowing away in the...
Read MoreI packed for Ireland with my mind on my last two trips: I could never quite get warm here. This time, even though it was July, I brought a warm jacket and clothes I could layer, plus a brand-new, purchased-just-for-this-trip rain jacket. Boy, was I surprised. Since I arrived it hasn’t rained a single drop. More remarkably, for over a week a heat wave has...
Read MoreIt started with Zana and the Albanian lessons. When I turned 40, I moved to Albania for a year to teach journalism. Once there, I immediately hired a language teacher. Language is a decoder ring; three times a week I sat with Zana parroting the goofy, stilted dialogue that is the Albanian equivalent of Look Jane look! See Spot run! Zana stood no higher...
Read MoreIn the great story of Navajo Creation, the Hero twins are a constant presence of adventure in warring against the Monsters of the Fourth World. It is through the conquest of this world, this dimension, that we are allowed peace and prosperity in the present world. The “people” were forced to move from one world level to another for their own misdeeds and...
Read MoreA summer camped out in a fire lookout on a peak gives me breezy company. On this plateau that means mostly the daily presence of winds named after the Greek gods of the south and west: Notus and Zephyr. These changeable companions amuse me when I step onto the catwalk to blow bubbles, startle me when a 40 mph burst charges past my door, and lure me in to...
Read MoreAt the end of my day it’s the little stories that collect and twist into the shawl of sleep. They replay sometimes at a more appreciative pace. Time slows down a little and the focal area widens and suddenly takes into view the cacophony, color, caresses and odors of the day I just dashed through. I catch the significance of a sideward glance or a...
Read MoreAt the conference I attended last week, one of the presenters recommended editing as a technique for achieving focus in one’s artwork. While I know the value of reviewing and culling my activities, I often forget that doing too much – and the requisite switches in attention – takes enormous amounts of brainpower. Even a tiny task, like making a phone call,...
Read More“If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.” –George Eliot I visited New York City recently; my birthday coincided with an arts workshop I had flown there to attend. A longtime...
Read MoreThese days I pick up a hitchhiker alongside the roadways of the Navajo Rez. I find that familiar and safe as a former traveler of such. The onset of the spring in all its glory brings to mind such longings. Out there was another world awaiting. The deep turquoise sky, a background of towering cumulous clouds promising rain and more. Freedom was my horizon,...
Read MoreYour day-off town is not the place where you wake up most mornings. If you have a day-off town, you work elsewhere: on the road, on the river or at a duty station for the park, the forest or for science. You guide or you fight fires or record artifacts, educate on the rez, or service trains east and west. After you’ve spent nine days on a cot, or weeks...
Read MoreDear Sam, I hope this finds you well, tucked away there in West Virginia’s sheltering hollers. I confess, I keep picturing you in your old trailer, although I’ve visited you twice since you’ve been in your new handmade house. I loved the closeness of the trailer to the creek. I’m sure you don’t take the creek for granted, but streams of water out...
Read MoreEight miles. That’s how far I walked along the south rim of Grand Canyon today. My hands are puffed up like little Vienna sausages, and my feet felt for a while like they would burst out of my shoes, but for the moment I’m sitting on the porch at El Tovar with my shoes unlaced, drinking a tumbler of club soda and a glass of Irony, a lovely Cabernet...
Read More“The deeper the sorrow that carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.” –Kahlil Gibran My father’s death in my mid-20s introduced me to grief and its idiosyncrasies. The sorrow I felt—and we all feel when we lose someone we love—had a language and texture all its own, one I’d never been versed in. Take a culture that is death averse, mix...
Read MoreI have traveled this road many times. Too many to recount. I measure them by my adventures and misadventures upon this stretch of life line. The route is from the foot of the Sacred Mountain of the West to the California coast. I am once again riding the rhythms of the road west into the San Francisco Bay. I have no flower in my hair, just the West Coast...
Read MoreStanding in front of a whiteboard in front of a class of wide-eyed second graders or a group of squirming teachers in a faculty meeting I wouldn’t say anything, but instead pick up a blue marker and draw a line that approximated a desk in the front row. Then I would pick up a red marker and create the shape of a head with a line of bangs and a graceful...
Read MoreMy older brother Homer told me about our Cherokee grandma walking with her people from Missouri alongside an oxcart that carried a few household goods and precious seeds into Texas about 1900. Our grandpa was a one-armed schoolteacher who saw the raven-haired beauty pass and declared he would “marry that woman.” Homer explored the prairies around Aledo,...
Read MoreListen to the author read this essay. Thanks to John Grahame and Radio Sunnyside for this recording. It began like this: our family made an epic journey through the colonias of northern Mexico, past irrigated fields and wood-and-metal shacks, surrounded by burros and horses, goats and chickens. These homesteads were nestled against earthen berms,...
Read MoreI went to grade school at St. Francis of Assisi, a Pepto Bismol-colored concrete building in the humid flatlands of South Florida. When I was in third grade, Sister Margaret Anina announced a poetry contest. I don’t remember that we were studying poetry or had learned much about it. Poetry back then was another unknown enterprise, and I had not learned to...
Read MoreIn my life creating art, I am asked where my inspirations and images come from. My world of unconventional reality. Much of it does come from dreams dreamt at night. Dreams I can still recall from decades ago. Dreamscapes I walked among and participated in. Dreams that are coming to reality now. On canvas and in our shared reality. Dreams are the drivers...
Read MoreIt was an impulse. I couldn’t predict I’d suddenly need to read the first paragraphs of the novels written by old friends, but once it felt necessary I found myself at Bookmans pulling hardbacks from shelves and standing on a stool in an aisle muttering words aloud. And then, satisfied I hadn’t forgotten my wonder at their words, I spent the day imagining...
Read More“Why do you bob your hair, girls?/It’s not the thing to do/Just wear it, always wear it/And to the Lord be true/And when before the judgment/You meet the Lord up there/He’ll say, ‘Well done, for one thing/You never bobbed your hair.’” –Blind Alfred Reed, 1927 The pickup truck carves the ranch road like a broken beer bottle through scattered mesquite...
Read MoreA few weeks ago, I started doing something I thought I’d left behind many years ago: I took up smoking again. (Before you jump to conclusions, let me say I’ve quit already.) Since I quit all those years ago, I’ve smoked about one cigarette a year. But the brain is a funny thing: for years after, I had dreams that included finding cigarettes in my purse,...
Read MoreIt’s a Thursday afternoon, halfway through the school year. My 11th and 12th graders file in for English class. “Are we reading today, Ms. Kelly?” Tyler asks as he holds up his copy of “The Lovely Bones.” We are, I tell him. The room hushes. The students open their books and lower their heads. One by one, we circle the room; each reads a few paragraphs...
Read MoreOur classroom was cramped; tiny and not designed for 30 students. It actually was an apartment for the overseer attached to the girls’ dormitory. We were the overflow at another government boarding school that ran out of space for us. While the new school was being constructed at Shonto for us, we were guests at Leupp School. That was a hard year. This was...
Read MoreStanding in front of a whiteboard in front of a class of wide-eyed second graders or a group of squirming teachers in a faculty meeting I wouldn’t say anything but instead pick up a blue marker and draw a line that approximated a desk in the front row. Then I would pick up a red marker and create the shape of a head with a line of bangs and a graceful...
Read MoreI’m headed north to the Grand Canyon to interview Eric Guisse, who began carving a homestead on the parks border more than 40 years ago. Greg Hales, my pardner in crime and videographer extraordinaire pilots his truck north through ponderosa and piñon scrub. As we pass through a clearing in the forest I glimpse a large white owl perched on a branch beside...
Read MoreComing home from the Calexico concert the other night, the moon was a grinning Cheshire cat, mocking me with his over-large smile from a perch in the sky-soup of stars and darkness. That blackness resonates with me, especially on these short winter days, but music soothes my dark inner beast. A few days later, I headed south for a warm respite in Blythe,...
Read MoreI think I may have briefly found the Christmas spirit in South Dakota in 1974. I had just talked myself into the first real job of my life. And about time, too: at the age of 24, I had a wife and two boys. We’d spent the previous years living in Appalachia’s backwoods trying our hand at homesteading. My job duties had included ploughing with a team of...
Read MoreI’m trying to learn to be better at making mistakes, and more willing to fail. On the face of it, that seems like a bad idea. But I’ve been reading about how failure can ultimately lead to success. I’m not convinced that’s the only requirement; success probably grows out of a combination of persistence, opportunity and a whole host of other qualities and...
Read MoreI spent the first 18 years of my life living in South Florida where I spoke the language of sand, intuited the rhythms of the ocean, and trafficked in seashells. All this worked just fine for the wallpaper of my young life until this time of year rolled around. I wanted snow. Christmas television shows featured well-groomed people in coats delighted by...
Read MoreIn these waning days of 2012, we have lost more than a few people who have touched us all collectively in the entertainment, political and sports worlds. With that consciousness, the past couple of months also found me saying goodbye to several close relatives as they journeyed into the Spirit world. Sadly, it is an all-too-common event these days,...
Read MoreI’ve never been called a motor mouth. Except for the occasional morning when compelling insight from overnight dreaming must be described in intricate detail upon waking, people I’ve lived with report they want me to say more, not less. I presume I inherited this reticence from my grandparents. All four came over on the boat from Finland. Perhaps you’ve...
Read MoreA few yards from my front door stands my favorite tree to pee under. It has ever been so. I imagine a delta rich in potash and nitrogen beneath the pine needles feeding the coyote gourd that twists and spreads downhill in a luxuriant profusion. From this sheltered vantage point I’ve surveyed many a sunrise and moonrise over the ragged edge of the forest a...
Read MoreLast week, I stopped by Starrlight Books in downtown Flagstaff to visit with the owner, Evan Midling. I’ve been curious to know how he learned the book business and came to own the place. I wondered how he manages to stay afloat in these seemingly tough times for independent booksellers. Between bookshelves, kachinas and framed art decorate the walls. Evan...
Read MoreThe wind, in the form of a dust devil, took my hat many years ago. I was 5 years old. I stepped out into the calm and warming day crowned by my new straw cowboy hat. I beamed beneath its brims as I showed it off to the daily gods. The mysteries. It took many days of piñon picking covered in tree pitch and aching knees to afford that fine hat from the local...
Read MoreNovember 2, 1999. It is late afternoon when I board the train from Bratislava to Budapest. I’ve taken this three-hour train ride down the spine of Eastern Europe every Wednesday for the past two months, as I commute from my home in the Slovak capital city to the Hungarian capital city to teach. My coat stays on as I slide into an empty car. The seats are...
Read MoreThe silence before the collapse: that’s what made us laugh. Three kids stack playing cards to make little rooms on the living room floor and then the colorful rectangles barely whisper when they fall down, turning our long minutes of focused concentration into one shared gasp. Dismay and delight mixed together. That’s what I think of when I stand back to...
Read More“Somebody said, ‘That’s a strange tattoo you have on the side of your head.’ I said, ‘That’s the blueprint left by the coal. A little more and I’d been dead.’” –“Coal Tattoo” by Billy Ed Wheeler I’m driving north along Highway 89 in the shadow of the San Francisco Peaks. The October sun threads the air with amber. It picks out the new straw color of...
Read MoreA few weeks ago, I dreamed of flying, not in an airplane, but mysteriously under my own steam. In my dream, I pedaled a winged contraption quickly enough to get and stay aloft as I soared over Wheeler Park and the roof of Federated Church. I used to have flying dreams when I was young, as late as my high school years. They were rare enough that I looked...
Read MoreIt’s 2001, and I live in Slovakia, an overlookable country with a language light on vowels. I’ve been here in Bratislava, the capital city, long enough to decode the essentials and enjoy the superficial mastery that bleeds into a muted smugness peculiar to ex-pats. But I’ve not been here long enough for social fluency. Instead I know just enough to be...
Read MoreAs another season of harvest and preparation for colder weather begins, my mind cannot help but wander back to the days of innocence lost, courtesy of my Bureau of Indian Affairs boarding school experience. School resumed for another year and with it came the pained expectation of family separations and abuses at the hands of the B.I.A. officials and my...
Read MoreWhen great pools of standing water shine day-break orange out along the Little Colorado, and I see spray from Grand Falls without my binoculars, I begin to think, “Outta here.” When a lightning-struck dead snag burns like a chimney but doesn’t start wet pine needles on fire, my mission shifts. This morning before sunrise, there I was bent over the beam of...
Read MoreMy father’s legacy to me was complex. It didn’t include land and investments or stocks and vehicles. He was a skilled craftsman with wood and iron but there was almost no material evidence of his life passed on to me. A story his older brother, my Uncle Hattler, told me more than 50 years ago helped me to understand his endowment to me of a love of music...
Read MoreI have two sisters. Between the three of us, we’ve had a range of reproductive experiences: miscarriages, near-misses with miscarriages, false positives, and the birth of live healthy babies. During her second pregnancy, one sister was told that her child would likely be born with Down Syndrome. In spite of that possibility, there was never any question...
Read MoreLate August in Flagstaff. Outside it rains cold, fat and purposeful drops. I’m inside, and reminded by NPR about the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Andrew. In a shimmering flash I am back in Miami Beach, back in Florida, back enfolded in the landscape that forged me. The water and salt. The crippling humidity and hot weather mania. A tribe of beloveds...
Read MoreA colorfully dressed young cowboy with a slight limp shuffled past me. I stood with one hand on the railings of the rodeo corral. I had come to see a friend I haven’t seen since my boarding school days. Seven years? The drone of the announcer’s amplified voice wore on: “Now out of chute four, we have a cowboy from Red Lake, Arizona, ‘Ba ahii da’ had’. Clap...
Read MoreMy father’s double-barrel 12-gauge shotgun hung above the mantle of our fireplace. He told me about the summer he was 12 and worked with a wheat threshing crew and earned 50 cents a day. The two purchases he made with his summer’s wages were a winter coat for his mother and a shotgun. I grew up in the gun culture. My early memories include a single-shot...
Read MoreNurse Nina Poore has singlehandedly inspired me to dare to be great in my 80s some day. “Nina won’t tell you” I heard repeated about Nina around town. She won’t tell you about being Arizona Daily Sun Citizen of the Year in 1990 or that Governor Rose Mofford awarded her a clock for her work with preventing substance abuse among children. That might be...
Read MoreIn an effort to entice myself back into the studio, I’ve been preparing scraps of fabric for collage, willing myself to do anything, as long as I’m in the studio. And it works: even these mundane tasks awaken a new appreciation for the fabrics, and remind me why this medium has always felt like home. These days I’m especially drawn to the fabrics with some...
Read MoreI lived with the Wadsworth family for two summers while I was in college. I was their nanny: the babysitter, the live-in help, and a full-time diversion for three young children. I lived a double life as a hippie on the frontier of the country club. Their tennis whites only enhanced my tomboy-beatnik style. I wore torn, ill-fitting jeans, red converse...
Read MoreMy father died unexpectedly when I was 26 years old. My parents divorced when I was in high school; my mother remarried and moved to New Zealand. On the day of my father’s death, my brothers and sister and I tearfully converged at his two-bedroom home to divvy up his meager worldly possessions: thousands of tools, books and some dour artwork that used to...
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“Dispatcher, I have a small glowing red and purple disc at 174 degrees, 31 miles, hovering over Mormon Lake.” “I copy, 174 degrees, 31 miles. We’ll call this Incident #4.” In 18 seasons at a handful of fire lookouts in central Arizona I’ve seen flares dropped from Air Force craft, I’ve seen dust from the Painted Desert roll down the Little Colorado like a...
Read More“Where the bluebonnets roll/And the white clouds sail slowly by/Where the little grey hawk/Pauses and hangs in the sky/I’m the lone shooting star/The sweet whip-poor-will’s cry/And the summer’s full moon/Where the bluebonnets roll.” –“Where Bluebonnets Roll By,” by Tony Norris Abilene is close. We glide through the short grass prairie of the...
Read MoreThis guest post is by Tyler Williams, a local writer, photographer and adventurer with several published works under his belt. Check out more of Williams’ work at www.funhogpress.com. Cresting the pass, we squinted, eyes searching for the blue dome of Navajo Mountain. That unmistakable hump hovering beyond the vastness provides me with predictable elation...
Read MoreSunday past was Father’s Day, a day set aside to honor the adult man in our lives—the constant source of strength and wrath. Our fathers. Growing up on the Dineh’ land of the 1960s, I do not recall any celebration for these ties. Summer set in and the dry and dusty days multiplied as my father’s voice echoed throughout the sheep camp. He sang loudly as he...
Read MoreOn windy June days with the monsoons a distant dream, I long for moisture. I find my way to the dry riverbed of the Rio de Flag. The rustling of coyote willow leaves is the closest water-like sound for miles. Twists and turns in the Rio reveal surprises—a morning cloak butterfly, a red fox behind a shock of bulrushes and an overturned shopping cart. This...
Read MoreAfter Maurice Sendak died last month, I was reminiscing about his books, and then about all the children’s books that made an impression on our family. Found in the stacks at Bookman’s, Sendak’s In the Night Kitchen, so quirky and fantastic, was one of our favorites: “Milk in the batter! Milk in the batter! We bake cake! And nothing’s the matter!” Our...
Read MoreIt’s not that I wouldn’t enjoy seeing Mary Chapin Carpenter and Shawn Colvin at the Lensic in Santa Fe, or Gillian Welch at the Orpheum, or Taj Mahal, or Melissa Etheridge at Fort Tuthill—worthy performers all—but in the big balancing act of my wallet and the world, I want always to keep a 20 dollar bill ready for a tip jar. If I too often buy the...
Read MoreA couple of weekends ago, I drove south to meet my youngest sister, Kristin, at the Phoenix airport. We’d hatched a plan a few weeks prior for her to fly from St. Louis to surprise Dana, our middle sister on her 50th birthday and our mom for Mother’s Day. We haven’t all been together for Mother’s Day since I left home in 1976. It felt momentous. We had to...
Read More“Time is a sort of river of passing events, and strong is its current; no sooner is a thing brought to sight than it is swept by and another takes its place, and this too will be swept away.” –Marcus Aurelius Last week I sat by the San Juan River for two days with my colleagues at the Grand Canyon Trust. We gathered to consider the future of...
Read MoreGazing across the vast and dusty Klethla Valley, my young eyes saw the boundaries of my world where the looming Black Mesa meets the sky, blue and eternal. The last stubborn remnant of snow patches hid away beneath the thick junipers. The sun traveled ever so slightly back towards the north; warming days reminded us that planting time was upon us soon. I...
Read MoreRecently I had dinner with a woman who arrived in Flagstaff on foot from Mexico. Passersby on Aspen who peered into the window of Mountain Oasis could hardly guess that gal savoring forkfuls of Greek salad had been hungering for feta cheese for more than 30 miles as she goosed herself along the Arizona Trail to get to Flagstaff ahead of a snowfall. We’d...
Read MoreSpring is firmly fixed in the bungee pattern I like to call bipolar. Whiteout conditions on Saturday bring a foot of serious snow to town and Monday sees short-sleeved skateboarders dodging the rosy crab apple trees in the parks. These very conditions make it hard for fruit trees to fulfill their duty in our little mountain town. Just about the time the...
Read MoreUnlike most American teens, I didn’t learn to drive when I was 16. We lived in Belgium where the legal driving age was 18, so when I returned to the states I was uninitiated to certain Midwestern rituals. My first summer back, in central Indiana, I had one date with a guy who drove a Ford pickup with a bench seat. He thought it was weird that I didn’t sit...
Read MoreThe Russian poet, Vera Pavlova wrote in her notebook: “There are moments when I feel the universe expand.” I too feel these moments of expansion, barely audible at times. I am lying on my cot at Lees Ferry reading poetry under a canopy of new, green leaves. They shimmer in the thin blade of moonlight while stars dazzle in the negative space of dark sky....
Read More“You betcha grandma, sure as you’re born. I’ll have some more potatoes and a thunderstorm.” –“Canned Goods” by Greg Brown The Russian olive branches are whipping the hillside to a brisk fandango beat. A delicate pink froth of blossom on the Nanking cherry hedge dips and bobs in the dance celebrating the return of spring to Doney Park. Tender...
Read MoreI used to pull picture books off library shelves to decide what vistas I longed to inhale, what routes I’d take through foreign lands, what hotel lobby would be just right for making a phone call to get a room at a youth hostel. Like me, perhaps you have furtively rifled through expensive guidebooks in the bookstore trying to memorize the 800 number for a...
Read More“It’s easy to focus on the sky on days when you are flying through the air from your home to a distant place.” That’s how I started my journal the day I left for Ireland a few weeks ago. I left Flagstaff on a Saturday, flying through clear blue skies, the airplane wing angled in contrast against a line of haze at the horizon. I bought a brand new Moleskine...
Read MoreI have a view from here, “y’aa.” What a view. My three sisters, they shine in the distance. “Sis na Jinni’” (Mt. Blanco to the east), “So Dzil’ (Mt. Taylor to the south), “Di be’ N’tsaa” (Hesperus peak to the north). My view has clouds today, like cataracts outside of my eyes. Like clouds bearing no rain. It is hard to hold onto ice, onto “Ke’sh je’”...
Read MoreThe end of winter is near and the woodpile is dwindling. The nights aren’t as long or as cold as they were a month ago, but I still take comfort in the fire. I dial my sister’s number and it rings in an old farmhouse across the country in another time zone. Her voice sounds so much like my own but on the other side of the receiver she lives an entirely...
Read MoreAt the young age of 8, I sat in awe as my elders hunched over a smooth bed of sand as the holy deities once again were given form. There on the hogan floor, to the low drone of an ancient chant, deft fingers gnarled by years of labor, drew fine lines of colored sand from their fingertips. As the son of a very important medicine man, I knew the significance...
Read More“You’re travelin’ through a world that you can use, though you shall never own. Your little fire makes it seem like home.” –“Little Fires” by K. W. Boyd A winter storm washed the sandy fields and black oak thickets along the Brazos. I watched the clouds thin and stretch and give way to glorious sweeps of amber colored light. I headed out to the...
Read MoreDear Reader, the sweet nothings have been murmured, the roses delivered, the valentines calculated and expensive dinners put on plastic. Now that the yearly ritual created to warm up winter with romantic gushing is behind us, let’s spend a little imagination on creating a new holiday; let’s have one to honor ex’s. How might we celebrate keeping connection...
Read MoreThe other day I spent a couple of hours with Jean Rukkila, who is one of my personal superheroes. We sit at the bar at the Monte Vista, looking across Aspen Street to West of the Moon. She confesses, “I used to fantasize having my little press in one window and massage table in the other window and a little sign, like those private eyes have, written on...
Read MoreI am sitting across the booth from Tony Norris at Brandy’s restaurant. It is still early for breakfast, but late enough so we can talk without disturbing the patrons. Except for the clinkings of dishes and utensils, it is a good place for our hushed conversation. This is new for me. Usually I am the one being interviewed. This is also Tony’s brainstorm. He...
Read MoreWhat if you didn’t owe any money, and all your stuff was in a 10 by 15 foot storage locker, and you were single and not desperately lonely—in fact, it feels like you might never be desperately lonely ever again—and your truck runs good enough, and your body works well, too. No prescription drugs necessary, no surgery pending. A little work on the...
Read MoreDarcy Falk is in her studio painting a 10-by-10-inch canvas. The background is awash with shimmering lilac, overlaid with a grid of silver dots. She adds another layer of red and orange acrylic to a pair of glowing poppies. A thin, white halo around the blossoms lifts them from the two-dimensional surface. She reveals how scary it is to be making these...
Read MoreBeing creative like Kate Watters is creative causes me to see one of those fierce short swirls down a desert canyon, the kind of wind that causes sand, willow leaves and bird song to brush against your deepest thoughts. The image occurs to me as I wait in her studio while she finishes a detail at a computer for the Grand Canyon Trust where she is the...
Read MoreI’m in Shonto Begay’s studio above the Downtown Diner. The floor-to-ceiling windows overlook the town square and flood the narrow room with bright illumination. Much of the time I’m speaking to a backlit silhouette surrounded by flares of light—a traveler in time. He is seated before a canvas the size of a sports bar flat screen. A series of figures are...
Read MoreAll this talk about the Rapture, Judgment Day and the End of the World has me thinking about my own religion: I belong to the Church of Desert Creeks. Deer Creek in Grand Canyon is home to the greatest patio in the world. It is part of sweeping bedrock shelf of Tapeats Sandstone that perches next to the creek as it enters the twisting narrows and finally...
Read MoreIn the early morning mist, we wake to an unfamiliar orchestra: the melodies of gibbons, stork-billed kingfishers, rhino hornbills, and countless insects and frogs shrouded in a mysterious curtain of jungle. We sleep on a 30-foot klotok (a traditional river boat) on a tributary deep in the heart of the last remaining rainforest of Tanjung Puting National...
Read More“Silent night, holy night, all is calm, all is bright …” The chorus rang off the canyon walls of my childhood at this time of the year. Beaming, hopeful and confused brown little faces sang heartily into the night so many years ago. There in the sandstone buildings, sitting on our knees, we were told about the reason for the season. Beneath an old grove of...
Read MoreOur Royal Palm turkey tom and his hen were intended for the Thanksgiving table. Each afternoon as they were released with the chickens to free-range and eat bugs and weed seeds, they didn’t miss an opportunity to display their magnificent crisp formal white plumage tipped in fretted inky black. The tom jumped up on chair or bench to be at eye level with...
Read MoreDavid lives in west Oakland, Calif., just across from the BART station. On the night of Nov. 2, he was one of 92 people arrested in protests in downtown Oakland. When he called the next night, he said, “Mom, I just wanted to let you know I’m OK.” Clueless, I wondered aloud, “Why wouldn’t you be alright?” I was kind of glad not to have known that he’d spent...
Read MoreA quick glance at my colorful mariachi hat collection can lift me from a gloomy November Sunday afternoon funk and into a mariachi state of mind. Mariachi and norteño music travels that thin divide between melancholy and fist-pumping elation. The staccato notes of trumpets go straight to the empty places while the accordion notes cajole you to live in full...
Read More“April gave us springtime, and the promise of the flowers … We knew no time for sadness, that’s the road we each had crossed. We were living a time meant for us, and even when it would rain, we would laugh it off. I’ve got pieces of April, I keep them in a memory bouquet. I’ve got pieces of April, it’s a morning in May.” –Dave Loggins’ “Pieces of April,”...
Read MoreOne hopes not to have bad things happen, but bad things do eventually and that’s when you’re lucky if you “live in a good place to have bad things happen.” My path to and from Maine takes me through my sister’s house in northwestern Connecticut. There I have plucked eggs from under the chickens, tapped maple trees to boil sap to syrup, pressed apples for...
Read More“In Apache Pass, Prince Rupert, Indian Jack puts a pistol to my head says, ‘How do you like your blue-eyed boy Mr. Dead?’” –“Criminology” by Tom Russell Ever been scared? I mean really scared—not scared that the eighth grade boys are gonna beat the crap out of you after World History. Not scared that your husband caught you checking out the hunky...
Read MoreA dream: I’m in the middle of an open field. In the distance is a swarm of bees, flying 30 feet off the ground, a humming, pulsing river of insects. In the middle of the field is an old swing set. I’m hanging off it, like I did when I was 10 years old, upside down with my knees locked over the bar. A few bees land on me, but don’t sting me. I drop to the...
Read MoreLast summer we suffered a large water leak that went unsuspected until a catastrophically expensive water bill showed up in our mailbox. Much later we discovered dampness in our crawlspace, where I stored my old art portfolios. The “greatest hits” of my entire artistic life were in various states of moldy ruin. As I sifted through the devastation, I saw...
Read MoreWith messages against snow making written upon our faces, we stare out from alleys and street corners of Flagstaff. Like Maori warriors, we speak our ancestors’ prayers across our skin. When audible words no longer carry weight and pleas cast into the coming storm dissipate, we volunteered our faces to carry our messages. You have seen us, our mugs...
Read MoreThe AAA TripTik said it is 2,737 miles from Flagstaff to my house in Maine, which is close to true in my truck even with getting lost outside Indianapolis. Now here I am, and today I’m building a box to dampen the noise of the sump pump in the basement. I don’t like launching off the bed when the pump kicks in at odd moments: mid good dream at 3 a.m., for...
Read MoreI came to the Arizona deserts from the generously watered coves and hollers of the Kentucky hills where songbirds flew across dewy, fern-clad hillsides. A single square mile of forest there might yield a 125 varieties of trees. My first job in my new home required me to crisscross the state. I drove over a thousand miles a week from the New Mexico...
Read MoreWhat do you see when you turn out the light? When I was younger, I thought this was a nonsense line, but as an adult I suddenly realized that John and Paul used this line as shorthand to ask all the questions about what delights and motivates us, what fills us up, what empty places and sorrows there are in our lives. It’s key to self-knowledge, this...
Read MoreAs our mountain summer dances with autumn, I cling to the fleeting glory of the rain-soaked San Francisco Peaks. I revel in the details—of lichen, flower petals and recently, the taxonomy of fungi. One day spent crawling around the forest studying mushrooms opens a fantasy world not unlike the one Alice found in Wonderland. Smoking cup mushrooms command...
Read MoreIn 1862, my people were rounded up and forced to walk over 450 miles to Bosque Redondo, near Ft. Sumner, N.M. This was Manifest Destiny in its glorious and ugly expansion with no regard to the preceding culture. There were four different routes that brought 9,000 prisoners eventually. Hundreds died along the trail. In 1865, the Bosque was the most...
Read MoreAs I steered toward being first in line at Macys one morning en route to the fire tower, I made a good stop at a Beaver Street yard sale: I scored three snap-button cowboy shirts, a serviceable fanny pack, and a $3 wooden chair from IKEA. That chair has made me the monk of impulsive outdoor meditating. Meditation practice courses through my life as...
Read MoreThis week’s guest columnist is Sue Ellen Norris. Author’s note: Tony Norris is off tracking a song in the Blue River wilderness about the Crooked Trail to Holbrook, so Sue Ellen Norris is keeping the Home fires burning. Sue is a master gardener and works with the Youth Garden Project for Flagstaff Foodlink. She tills the cinder soil at the foot of...
Read MoreIn the beginning, in 1998, we held Flagstaff Open Studios to make art more accessible to the general public and the art-making process less mysterious. People came to our studios, and we did it again the next year. Fourteen years later, we’re still making our art and telling our stories. I’ve missed a couple of years, once because I had a brutal bronchial...
Read More“It is not down on any map; true places never are.” –Herman Melville, “Moby-Dick” I have always been drawn to maps. The swirling topographic lines over miles of the Earth’s surface grant me the rare insight of a soaring hawk. I have a habit of collecting maps of places I would like to go. I study the folds of ridges and the names of distant mountain...
Read MoreNow that I have seen 57 winters, I know I have fewer winters to feel. I feel more connected than ever before to that ground that holds my umbilical cord, as well as my childrens’. I can never sever my tether there … and here. Every week I see my mother’s face, and upon her face, all will read clearly, “I am happy, my son, I am light of grief seeing you...
Read MoreLaced into Flagstaff neighborhoods, cinched into local lore, if you’ve lived here long enough you know local old timers who offer a feast of stories. I lived awhile on Dale Street across from the late Mrs. Black, the Boston-educated cowboy-savoring widow of Sheriff Black. If I saw the pink smear of her favorite dress catching sun in a window, I’d stop by...
Read More“The goal of feng shui as practiced today is to situate the human built environment on spots with good qi. The ‘perfect spot’ is a location and an axis in time.” –Wikipedia The new Bookmans may have lost something in the translation. When five feet of snow claimed its roof, it took a full year for the doors to reopen. I had played in the...
Read MoreWhen the days turn steamy, there’s nothing better for sleep than the cool night air humming over you. Before the rains started, my parents visited to escape the Tucson heat. We gave them our bedroom and slept outside on cots and sleeping pads. The night air was cool, almost cold, and I slept with my down bag zipped up and relished the chilled air that...
Read MoreMy sister and I climbed into the Quezada and Sons shuttle headed to Casas Grandes, Chihuahua. The 15-passenger van was full of people heading home, and we were the last to board. Nobody flinched as we clambered into the back seat and wedged ourselves between the big shopping bags and a strapping older Mexican man. We were the only gringos on the van and at...
Read MoreOn that very hot and dusty summers day in 1972, I held out my thumb an willed and old Chevy truck to a stop. “Haa nizaa goh?” (How far?) “A’ayiddi ji’, Cowsprings Ji.” (A short way, just to Cowsprings.) It was a brief ride but it was progress nonetheless. I had walked out that morning from my sheepcamp four and a half miles off U.S. 160 that courses...
Read MoreDownhill dirt roads do focus one’s attention, so as I rounded a curve on a switchback from the lookout this week I easily spotted branches across a narrow stretch ahead. I cinched the parking brake and got out of my truck to clear the way wondering which wind event had broken branches. As I bent to the chunks of pine I saw a message scratched in the dirt....
Read More“How much for the whetstone and the old pocket knife?” I was indulging in my Saturday morning yard-sale therapy. I was only interested in the worn gray sharpening stone but I could see that the blades of the cheap jackknife had been carefully whetted until they would shave hair from your forearm. “They were my granddad’s. How does 2 dollars for the stone...
Read MoreFar from the fires around Flagstaff, we’ve been in chilly Ogden, Utah, this past weekend. It was green almost beyond belief—the only gaps in the lushness are where snow still covers the mountainsides and peaks. The reservoirs are brimming, and the rivers are running at full tilt: falling over cliffs of quartzite and granite and crashing down mountainsides....
Read MoreAll this talk about the rapture, Judgment Day and the end of the world has me thinking about my own religion: I belong to the Church of Desert Creeks. Deer Creek in Grand Canyon is home to the greatest patio in the world. It is part of a sweeping bedrock shelf of Tapeats Sandstone that perches next to the creek as it enters the twisting narrows and finally...
Read MoreIt has been over 10 years since I created a stir in my community with my art. I want to revisit this tempest not out of any residual angst, but to further educate the viewing public. Fortunately for me, most of my viewing public is made up of sophisticated consumers. But for those not familiar with this event, here it is … again. Three months into an...
Read MoreOperatic trilling? Amplified gargle? That bird’s intention is to be flutist Jean-Pierre Rampal keeping up with Claude Bolling’s jazz on piano. My dreaming melts into the pillow and soon I’m upright wondering at this bird voice steering me away from tea and e-mail, shower and chore. That bird insists I put footsteps on the planet, until I match its burst of...
Read More“In the dead of the night/In the still and the quiet/I slip away like a bird in flight/Back to those hills/A place that I call home.” –“West Virginia,” Hazel Dickens The battered convertible hurtled between cut rock walls covered with matted honeysuckle vines whose sweetness covered me like a benediction. Barn swallows scissored the sky above me as...
Read MoreAt the front window, the dogs stand with their tails in the air and a ridge of hair raised along their backs. They are on alert, poised to protect us from the dangers posed by blowing bits of paper and leaves, and whatever else might happen along on this windy day. They pace the floor. They follow me around the house and never quite settle into their usual...
Read MoreMy bus commute takes twice as long as it does to drive to work in my car, but that time is not wasted. I put those extra minutes to good use daydreaming, or reading a poem. I listen to music, write notes to myself, watch people and stare out the window. Riding the bus creates a suspended state of dreamy traveling in your daily schedule, unlike being behind...
Read MoreSpring is finally here again. The long winter’s slumber once again is awakened by squawking pinyon jays. The red earth once again dominates as winter’s lace of ice recedes. Sheepcamps are alive with bleatings of newborn lambs and kids. The moon of “the stirring of the seedlings” is steeped in Mother Earth. Cornfields are ready to receive this year’s crop....
Read MoreThough one can leave an hour margin to get to missions in Phoenix on time—and you can avoid the rush hours with wise planning—still you don’t know when the system of pavement, exits and speed limits will seize up and there you are behind an idling semi truck, two lanes halted, with no escaping at Cordes Junction because you’re south of that already; you...
Read More“Pancho Villa crossed the border in the year of ought 16/The people of Columbus still hear him riding through their dreams/He killed 17 civilians you could hear the women scream/Blackjack Pershing on a dancing horse was waiting in the wings/Tonight we ride, tonight we ride/We’ll skin ol’ Pancho Villa, make chaps out of his hide/Shoot his horse,...
Read MoreAfter the Viola Awards a few weeks ago, a bunch of us traipsed over to Uptown Billiards in search of closure and whiskey. Poet and owner of Uptown, James Jay, had just won the Viola Award for Literature. Upon receiving the award he recited a beautiful poem (not even his own) that brought me to tears. Several of the acceptance speeches that night were...
Read MoreWhat I love about the Grand Canyon is … all of it. But what I absolutely treasure are its springs that form lush biodiversity strongholds. These springs could be depleted or contaminated by a renewed interest in uranium mining. Two weeks ago I joined more than 100 Flagstaff residents at a public meeting to learn about the proposed withdrawal of 1,010,776...
Read MoreAs some of you may know by now, I was the featured artist at the Heard Museum a couple of weekends ago and therefore was not able to attend the third annual Viola Awards gala. I would like to congratulate all the recipients of the Viola awards. It truly is a blessing to be part of such a vibrant community of artists, to be part of a community that...
Read MoreI see you. You’ve pulled Flag Live out of your book bag and so it is wrinkled where your nursing text, that enormous tome, has crushed both your newspaper and your container of yogurt. And you there: you’ve set the paper down on a ring of leftover latte at your favorite wooden-tabled, street-peeking, or peak-viewing home to seekers of the morning buzz. Or...
Read MoreDaddy was a connoisseur of objects. Some might say junk. Some came from the salvage yard on the old White Settlement Road. He would take a load of rusty iron, copper wire salvaged from electric motors and brass plumbing fittings to sell by the pound, and then spend hours going through wooden boxes filled with dusty tools, screws, bolts and nails. He would...
Read MoreIn “Finding Flow,” Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi writes, “The quality of experience [is] a function of the relationship between challenges and skills. Optimal experience, or flow, occurs when both variables are high.” When you address big challenges with high skill levels, feats of creative genius are possible. This is true for any field. Even within the rigid...
Read MoreIf you have ever wanted to write your own song and sing it to someone, it is good to know that you are not alone in this crazy undertaking. On a recent Monday evening I joined a group of people who congregate monthly on the second floor mezzanine at the Hotel Weatherford for this very reason. This truly inspired location—180 degrees of windows that consume...
Read MoreIn spite of the extreme cold weather, I was glad to see many people out to hear Winona LaDuke at the Audrey Auditorium last Tuesday evening. It was good to see and hear her again. As a native woman, she holds a very sacred position as a messenger of humanity and Mother Earth. I believe it is always appropriate to begin in one’s own language. It is the...
Read MoreDuring the stillness of 3 to 5 a.m. I might be dreaming, I might be whistling through my nose or I might be noting the Big Dipper balanced on its handle outside my bedroom window, followed by nodding at the half moon grinning over the kitchen sink when I get up to make tea. Lately, a recently published memoir by Leslie Marmon Silko keeps me company until...
Read MoreThe therapist works her elbow along my breastbone and with an audible pop my rib moves back to its proper place. I had tripped over a space heater’s power cord that morning and wind-milled across the room catching myself on the door jam and painfully tweaking my back and ribs. I hobbled to Nicci, possibly the world’s best massage therapist for healing....
Read MoreIt feels to me that things are falling apart, like the poem: “the centre will not hold.” We’re trapped in a socio-political centrifugal machine, where the heaviest mettle gets spun to the outer edges of society and separates into its most irrational component parts. Last Sunday I drove into spring: down I-17, first past dun-colored hills and...
Read MoreI spent my last day on a month-long trip to Southeast Asia in Bangkok’s Chinatown. I floated on a river through narrow alleyways in an urban wilderness of determined shoppers. About half of the food items for sale I would not regard as edible: dried squids, brains, livers and pig’s hooves. As I observed this spectacle of commerce, I considered the...
Read MoreMay we all move forward into the New Year and decade with courage. This is written as a petition to God, to the Great Spirit and many more power names. Yet in the end it is into the great mystery, however we view it, whatever name we gave it. Our appeals for mercy and validation of our being remains always the truth. A common cry from a humble From the...
Read MoreI live in a house where an apple tree keeps sending leaf messengers to the doorstep. Beginning in October and continuing as snow falls at the year’s end, I’ve arrived home to feel the crunch of leaf matter under my feet while I look through my pockets for my keys. For weeks and weeks I’ve been sweeping them up from the front yard to put in the back yard...
Read More“I had an old hen she had a wooden foot/She made her nest by a mulberry root/Laid more eggs than any hen around the farm/A whole wooden leg wouldn’t do her any harm.” —“Cluck Ol’ Hen” The pounding autumn rains that followed this summer’s fires scoured the topsoil of centuries from the sides of the peaks. The bare bedrock gleaming bone white between...
Read MoreAfter my grandmother died, my mom and my Aunt Nina took up her holiday cookie-baking gauntlet. This was not an undertaking for the faint of heart. Grandmére was a prodigious baker of cookies; around the winter holidays she spent hundreds of hours filling tins with sweets to pass along to her family, friends and neighbors. I’ll go out on a limb of...
Read MoreAs we munched turkey leftovers spread on toast with gravy the question went around the table, “What do you want for Christmas this year?” Everyone else wanted experiences or edibles: no stuff! I, however, wanted a big thing: that white baby-face Fiat 500 I rented for a day to do a quick trip to Phoenix. I loved the Bose speakers, the moon roof, the...
Read MoreMy husband Dan and I have a holiday tradition that came about somewhat unintentionally and has now become known as the Misfit Thanksgiving. It began when we moved to Flagstaff 15 years ago and shared a house with several over-wintering river guides. The Misfit Thanksgiving offers anyone away from family a place to go to share a meal and celebrate our...
Read MoreI was recently asked what I enjoy listening to as an inspiration or background in my studio. Like most artists, I do not have a particular favorite in music makers nor genre. I take what I can synchronize my movements with, in body and spirit—sounds that amplify the depth of the colors and the sensuality of forms. I listen to music that creates for me an...
Read MoreI confess, the natural disasters Flagstaff has experienced in the last year have honed my survival instincts. With Nov. 2 looming on the horizon I interpreted the low tea-colored clouds as an impending landslide of poor judgment and I headed toward the Mexican border before they closed it. Desperate to breathe air untainted by negative campaign adds I...
Read MoreLast weekend my 18-year-old niece, Taylor, came to visit. She’s graduating next spring and looking at colleges. Though I’ve known her all her life, I didn’t feel like I really knew her. I was afraid it would be awkward, but instead, her visit became a sweet opportunity to get to know her. Taylor is a photographer. Her high school offers photography...
Read MoreOct. 30th 2007 was like any other day for Eric York, a wildlife biologist at Grand Canyon National Park. He rose in the late autumn darkness, gathered his field gear and negotiated the rugged Kaibab limestone cliffs to check his snares and look for fresh mountain lion kill sites. That morning he received a mortality signal indicating that P13 (the 13th...
Read MoreAmong the many journeys I’ve taken, I have to say that being in the ranks of the National Park Service as a naturalist/ranger tops the list. In all, I spent 10 years in various parks in the American west. A stint in the Tetons in northwestern Wyoming was glorious and adventurous, as was my time on the South Rim of the Grand Canyon in the late 1970s and...
Read MoreTony: I’m in the planning stages for a new CD of lullabies, those songs intended to calm the fretful child and persuade him to fall fast asleep. It seems all my younger friends have babies and toddlers. Having raised five of my own and boasting eight grandchildren, I want to record a collection of soothing tunes that might make bedtime a little easier for...
Read More“Above all he learned from the river how to listen, to listen with a still heart with a waiting, open soul, without passion without desire, without judgment.” –Herman Hesse I’m lying in my silk sheet sack under the big spread of stars on a beautiful sandy beach in the Grand Canyon. The moon is new and the sky is as black as can be. The Milky...
Read MoreRoberta and I motored out Highway 89 today to visit Judy, who lives with Pete on a sizable spread in the pinyon-juniper forest north of Flagstaff. We drove out to see the remnants of her garden, but Judy gave us the home tour, too. I’ve decided: the expansive greenhouse is my dream home, lack of toilet facilities notwithstanding. Near sunset, we reveled in...
Read MoreThe stems of the amaranth in my yard have turned a deep embarrassed purple in just the last week. They were just part of the background of an unusually lush tangle of knee-high greens, but the shortening hours of sunlight and almost freezing temps have triggered a chemical color shout-out that makes them tremble and vibrate. It hasn’t been cold enough to...
Read MoreShe was born on the 10th of September at 4:30 a.m. PST in Fairbanks, Alaska. She is my newest granddaughter and the third blessed daughter of my eldest daughter, Enei and her husband, Evon. She joins a beautiful young family of four kids, the eldest being my grandson, Olav and his sisters Na NI eezh and Cheii lil. I have yet to greet her personally. With...
Read MoreOn a local mountain peak where a metal fire tower begins to shiver with the approach of fall, distant lightning arrives with sunrise one morning. To the creep of yellow and the spread of turquoise on the eastern horizon an insertion of orange meets the flashes of lightning over Winslow. Briefly bright cumulus clouds pulse for a hundred miles along the...
Read MoreSometimes the real show is not the one we showed up for. I’m always delighted when the hidden and serendipitous performance unfolds and I am there—the accidental audience looking on at the unscheduled dance. It was an evening some 20 years ago at the Coconino Center for the Arts. The Bluegrass Cardinals were playing! It was one of the first shows Dick...
Read MoreI’ve been missing the steady tone of a good novel, so when my book club decided to read Barbara Kingsolver’s newest, “The Lacuna,” I felt relieved to be given the assignment even though the book is long and time is short. Plus it gives me something to do in the middle of the night. One of the best lines I’ve read so far is this: “Mother is a museum of bad...
Read More“And what of the light this and every August, different from other months, no way to explain the precision of its shadows, the warmth of its brightly lit edges, the need to show what summer has come to before it ends.” –Wyn Cooper There have been late summer nights that I spent on the North Rim when the air is crisp and damp with the memory of rain...
Read MoreAs the summer comes to an end again, I feel that slight tint of autumn waiting upon the late summer air, waiting to gather up the sounds and colors of the season’s excitement. There is a bit of residual sadness that I have learned to associate with this changing of season. For me, it has always been the time when you put away your carefree days and begin...
Read MoreWhenever you lie anywhere on a cot in a sleeping bag with a delicious red plaid flannel lining, your very dreaming might feel cozy like floating upon a gentle cloud. If that cot and red sleeping bag is inside a fire lookout at eight or nine thousand feet, and it is an August day with monsoon moisture lowered down around your ears, then you might actually...
Read More“Like our travels, our workdays burned upon the world/lifting its inwards up in fire. Veiled in that power/our minds gave up the endless cycle of growth and decay/and took the unreturning way, the breathless distance of iron.” –Wendell Berry, “Horses” The lightning has been pitchforking across the eastern sky for 45 minutes. I breathe deeply of the moist,...
Read More“After four decades devoted to informing fans about the cowboy life style of Roy Rogers and his wife, Dale (Queen of the West) Evans, the family museum in Branson, Missouri, has shut its doors … Christie’s (Auction House) will be selling off most of the collection July 14-15 … (including) … Rogers’ trusty costar Trigger, in the flesh.” –The New...
Read MoreThere are some houses that just feel like home, and the trail crew bunkhouse at the Grand Canyon was like that. It was a dilapidated old place that the government wanted to tear down because it created an eyesore on an otherwise historic street. As the renowned flophouse for seasonal trail workers, it resembled a cowboy fraternity house. But housing was...
Read MoreThere is now a brand new piece of public art in Williams, Ariz., on the exterior wall of Native America gift store in the heart of downtown in this small town that I have come to enjoy. The image commands attention a block away in a gentle way, and I am proud to say that this latest piece is my creation—a gift I chose to give. On a chance lunch months ago...
Read MoreLately at the lookout I’ve been reading verses by Robert Service. (In a busy fire season, one finds balance where one can.) Sometimes called “The Canadian Jack London,” Service liked his people and places to have a bit of grit. It’s not hard to imagine him feasting on the details of a fire camp, so as I watched rain sprinkle the dark swath of the Schultz...
Read MoreThe plume of smoke is robust. Deep white—like God’s own puffball mushroom—twisting and alive with the effort of rising from behind Mt. Elden. My home lies over there. It’s Father’s Day Sunday and we’re having a BBQ at my daughter’s house on Cherry Hill. Our first fire of the season started at the edge of town just three days ago. The radio confirms that...
Read MoreThis morning I took the dog for a walk up the urban trail. Gilia, milkvetch and dalmation toadflax were all in bloom. I pulled up a few of the invasive toadflax plants, making a tiny action toward weeding the forest. In my own wild yard, the iris blossoms are spent. Columbine, sage and lavender are flowering now, and beneath the thick mulch, the soil is...
Read MoreTen summers ago I worked as a gardener for the Arboretum at Flagstaff. I dug in deep, learning the names of native plants and how to cultivate them. I weeded to the sound of the summer breeze and the racket of hummingbirds sparring over penstemon blossoms. The San Francisco Peaks rose like an indigo ship from the distant horizon. I helped build a water...
Read MoreAlong with welcoming in the heat of summer after a very long and dramatic winter, we have much to hope for and celebrate. An event that holds the greatest hope for us is the graduation of our youths. I wish you all the best as you enter the “real” world, the world where you are the captain of your own ship. As you venture forth, just know whatever the...
Read MoreIn a classroom at a middle school the effervescent students wanted me to know one among them “doesn’t talk.” Every day we’d all draw and add words to our drawings: I was the honored guest there for a two week arts in education gig. The teacher was a genius with seventh graders. And one among us they called “selectively mute.” I liked her doodles of Ren and...
Read MoreThe morning sun backlit the new leaves of the elm and oak trees along the stream, and they glowed with an emerald fire to rival that of some fat bishop’s jewels. The church’s marble spire stood against the skyline. A skinny boy in ragged overalls belly crawled through a tangle of fox grape and cat briar to the edge of a sandy cut bank and surveyed the...
Read MoreThrough a fortunate set of circumstances, I recently spent 10 days living at the south rim of Grand Canyon hiking, making art, writing and then, on the last two days, sitting on the jury panel for the park’s Artist in Residence program. Though I feel I barely know the canyon, I am enthralled. Also, intimidated, curious and profoundly impressed. Each...
Read More“It is certain in any case that life is quite disarmed by the gift to live so entirely in the present, to treasure with such eager care every flower by the wayside and the light that plays on every passing moment.” –Hermann Hesse Nothing grounds me in the moment or in a place more effectively than when I am immersed deeply in the world of botany. It...
Read MoreYa’ateeh’ Shi Ya azh, a’we’. “My beautiful baby, my child”—a loving greeting of a mother to her son. Blessedly, this is the line I know well. My mother and all mothers draped their child in these tender words of affection. Unconditionally. I glow in the knowledge that I have a mother that gently releases this truth. I was always told that we need to be...
Read MoreI tore the label off of a pint bottle of water to write down the title for this column. On a recent hike I had a pen in my pocket but no paper, and I wanted to keep the sentences that seemed to bob up from the current of my thoughts like a cork that won’t sink. I like to take the cork from dinner’s wine bottle along when I walk by the rivulet at Schultz...
Read More“Inch by inch/Row by row/Gonna make this garden grow/All it takes is a rake and a hoe/And a piece of fertile ground/Inch by inch/Row by row/Someone bless these seeds I sow/Someone keep them safe below/Till the rains come a-tumblin’ down.” –”The Garden Song,” by David Mallett Shanti and Corey Rade Whipstone Farm, Paulden, Ariz. Dear Shanti and Corey,...
Read More“If you do not intend to stipulate that marks of punctuation be transmitted, write your message without punctuation and read it carefully to make sure that it is not ambiguous.” –Instructions from a 1928 pamphlet intended to help people write more effective telegrams. I’ve been thinking about texting and telegrams lately, and wondering what we might learn...
Read MoreLast month I was given the honor of receiving the 2010 Viola Award for individual artist contributing to the aesthetic health and wealth of our community. I am truly humbled and grateful for the recognition. The capacity crowd filled the hall of the Radisson to celebrate the organizations and individuals picked for this year’s award ceremony. Familiar...
Read MoreSpring has finally arrived in Flagstaff, and as the heavy blanket of winter snow thaws I experience a sense of abundance. The Rio de Flag offers the rare and shimmering promise of water as it twists and turns through our neighborhood on its way to join Diablo Creek and the Little Colorado River as they flow into the mother Colorado. The water coaxes great...
Read MoreI want Warrior Mouse. As soon as I saw him in the window at Puchteca Indian Art I started putting the occasional extra five-dollar bill into a tea tin savings bank: For weeks I’ve walked San Francisco Street to the post office so I can admire the feather on his head and the white spots on his delicate but fierce mouse body. I make up stories about where he...
Read MoreOne recent night I e-mailed a photo of my bookshelf to a writer at The New Yorker. It’s hard to recall quite what seized my shy person’s soul to cause me to upload a rectangle of my private life into a stranger’s computer across the continent. I do know I felt wonder to read in a national forum—The Book Bench—an article about analyzing a person by...
Read MoreThere’s snow falling—again—but I’m starting to get my annual urge to dig in the dirt. This is a dangerous impulse in Flagstaff in early March, but considering the possibility raises some hope in me. Years ago as newlyweds, we lived for two years in an Iowa farmhouse. All things seemed fertile there, including me. That summer I was pregnant with our older...
Read MoreA musician’s life is a shared life, sometimes with an audience but always with his instrument. Performers often develop an intimate love-hate relationship with their guitar—naming them after sweethearts and mythic champions—and sacrificing to be with them. In 1949 BB King was playing a dance hall in Twist, Arkansas. Two drunks got in a fight over a women...
Read MoreThe Grand Canyon swallowed me whole. It was as if one day I descended beneath the rim and emerged more myself. Being outside for me has always been like buying back the unhappy moments in my life, minute by minute. As a child I sought refuge exploring the wilderness of my Vermont back yard. Today even the smallest escape to the forest or canyons can...
Read MoreWith the storm behind us and another birthday behind me, I feel the tinge of spring in the air. Soon the ice-sculpted curbs and alleyways of our town will be but a memory. Ahead is the lush carpet of wildflowers of spring, where a field of campaign signs are blooming. It’s late winter, a city council and mayoral campaign is under way, and a fresh crop of...
Read MoreFalling out of orbit in the Friendship 7 space capsule: as a girl I wanted to do it! Maybe that’s when I became eager to spend company with large chunks of fast moving metal. Hence, I can sometimes be found on the platform of the train station when Amtrak arrives in the evening. This Sunday I counted 11 people getting on and 23 getting off. The two engines...
Read MoreA few weeks ago I was in Mexico, and slept nine nights in my sleeping bag on my friends’ front porch. My sleep was not without middle-of-the-night wakings, but I easily released back into sleep after each one. The rhythm of a life lived mostly outside, and mostly without a timepiece, agrees with me. While there, and against the odds, I got some of the best...
Read MoreIn my youth I was a humble working cowboy riding for the CO Bar—that’s the Babbit Ranch. One day the Old Man came to me and said, “My prize broodmare has run off. Track her down and bring her back.” He was boss so I saddled up my pony and set out to find that runaway horse. All day I rode through the golden aspens under a bright blue sky and it was a...
Read MoreBy the time you read this piece, we should know if all the hype of this week’s back-to-back snowstorms lived up to the expectation. Two to three feet we are told, and anything less will be a letdown. With natural emergency what it is today, we have to be extra careful and prepare for such ominous predictions. This elevated sense of danger and adventure...
Read MoreOn this long, bright eve of a new year, the blue moonlight casts a neon glow on the snow and I am restless for a new beginning. The media’s incessant cataloging of the triumphs and misfortunes of not just the past year but the entire decade has sparked me to reference my own. But I cannot summon the thoughts hiding in the shadows of my mind to become words...
Read MoreBecause I still have family and friends in the city where I was born, it’s easy for me to be a winter connoisseur of Phoenix back yards. In this back yard, my head rests on a pillow in the shade of a grapefruit tree while my belly and legs and feet bake in afternoon sunshine. Birds squeak, a girl behind a block wall beyond the alley squeals while her daddy...
Read MoreHave you noticed that more people are shopping for second-hand goods these days? With lots more people shopping at Goodwill, St. Vinnies and Savers these days, seems like the pickings are getting a little slim. That’s why I’m starting a campaign to get people to clean out their closets and garages and donate stuff they’re not using. Around this time of...
Read MoreI’m sitting in my studio today stitching on a project that has no intent. It doesn’t need one: it’s simply beautiful. And that makes me happy. My needle moves in and out of a sandwich of rayon challis and silk chiffon, a repetitive meditation on color. There’s no other point to it, which is a nice break from my usual, content-driven artistic pursuits. The...
Read MoreFall makes me greedy. I want to capture the light and the colors and the smells for safekeeping, so I can enjoy them in the dead of winter, when the light is too low, the days are too short and the colors are not so vivid. The sun streams into my studio this fall morning, at that rare angle perfectly designed to show off the yellows and reds of the leaves...
Read MoreAudria is a massage therapist and a painter. She’s well-known for her lovely cloudscapes, having studied clouds closely and painted them for years. She’s painted clouds on the ceiling of her massage room in greys, yellows, browns and blues. It’s one of the favorite moments of my month: to be on her massage table, and roll over onto my back and study her...
Read MoreA couple of Saturdays ago, I unintentionally went contra dancing. And though I’ve been before, I never understood the appeal of it. This time, though, I really enjoyed myself. I needed to get out of my head for a while, and while I’m not sure why this time was different, it worked. At one point, the caller said something that made my ears perk up: “It’s...
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When I worked for the government as a fire lookout, I would watch the distant dandelions of fireworks on the Fourth of July and toast my father’s birthday. Standing in that dark capsule on a mountain top I’d think of him in Europe with the 94th Infantry and wonder how his experience compared to the episodes of the television show, COMBAT, we watched as...
Read MoreIn our family of girls in the early ‘60s, my two sisters’ and my primary jobs appeared to be staying clean and staying safe, not necessarily in that order. In my mother’s defense, these two principles – cleanliness and safety – were deeply embedded in the culture of that time. The edge of that generation of women raised to be housewives and mothers barely...
Read More“The true antidote for greed is contentment.” The Dalai Lama The yard demands my attention. A neighbor walked by as I was gardening last weekend and said, “You’re doing the meditation of one thousand dandelions.” In my case, it’s more like one hundred thousand dandelions, and soon to be more, since every one is going to seed at this exact moment. In Rush...
Read MoreA vague sadness seems to be endemic in my circle of friends these days. No one’s really talking about it, but there it is, just under the fabric of our daily lives. It’s not suffering we want to make public. At its worst, tears stream down your face, mascara runs, and your features contort, making you look like Tim Curry’s character at the end of The Rocky...
Read MoreThis week’s column is by Scott Thybony. Late at night a snowstorm moved across Indian Flat north of the San Francisco Peaks. It was gone by morning, leaving behind a stillness so tangible it woke me up. Looking outside, I saw the pinyon trees buried in white with a foot of new snow filling the cut of the road. Soon I had the fire going and a column...
Read MoreI believe that – if we’re lucky – we’re always in the process of becoming our true selves. Sometimes it happens slowly, with baby steps, then, suddenly, by giant leaps, like some weird game of psychic “Simon Says”. This is the story of how a red leather purse could effect one tiny transformation. My friend Laura brought this incredibly beautiful,...
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I know a woman who celebrated Winter Solstice at the South Pole by inviting fellow workers at the station there to join her with wine to watch a DVD of the Peter, Paul, and Mary Christmas Concert. When I pictured it, I imagined them as far from Christmas as possible, almost as if they celebrated on a space ship. Indeed I read a blog where a worker who...
Read MoreIn my album of baby photos, there is a photograph of my granddaddy taken sometime in the 1950s. He’s standing inside a rustic cabin, holding up a fish that’s about two feet long, and wearing a plaid flannel shirt underneath a canvas jacket. The jacket was probably lined with more flannel. Flannel played a leading role in Granddaddy’s wardrobe. Granddaddy...
Read MoreThe noise from my roof sounds as if it’s either hailing or a herd of small rodents is running across it. Neither is true: A single yellow aspen leaf has landed on the skylight above my head, backlit by the mid-morning light. The next second, it’s gone. The wind is blowing the leaves off the aspen tree in back. These fall days feel so aimless. Lifeless...
Read MoreThis week’s post is by Peter Friederici Investment banks and other financial giants have been acting like panicked polar bears drifting too far out on a warming sea, jostling and occasionally cannibalizing one another as they compete for the dwindling space available on their melting ice floe. The carnage is of Biblical proportions: Then, lo!, did...
Read MoreI am living on the edge. No, not that edge. My edge has a chain-link fence along it, so I won’t walk over the cliff in the middle of the night, I guess, and sue the State of California. We are at a state beach in southern California, living both the paradise and the nightmare that is urban camping. Our neighbor’s radio is blasting Ryan Seacrest, counting...
Read MoreThis week’s column is by Scott Thybony. No matter how hard things get, most of us know someone who has it even harder. As a writer, I’ve found myself listening to the stories of people who have suffered in ways most of us can’t imagine. Some have been friends and others strangers, people who have survived torture and starvation, slave...
Read MoreA few years ago, I spent the month of March strolling around Santa Fe, camping on the beach in Baja California, then trekking through Araviapa Creek on my first-ever backpacking trip. In Mexico, I slept on the beach. The night sky was at once astonishing and consoling, and I spent hours stargazing, trying to memorize the arrangements, reconnecting with the...
Read MoreThis week’s column is by Scott Thybony. Before heading up the mountain to help brand cattle, I stop at a café on the edge of Flagstaff. Some ranchers are having their morning confab, and the cowboy next to me stares into a cup of coffee nursing a hangover. “What’s that?” asks a man watching something move across the floor. Turning,...
Read MoreThis week’s column is by Megan Buchanan-Cherry. After having lived very happily in Flagstaff for a number of years, I recently reluctantly moved down tot Prescott when I got engaged. I am no reluctantly engaged, just sad to not be living in Flagstaff anymore. Actually, it was just over one year ago; I’m still in denial, plus I still come...
Read MoreHere is what I think about while I’m working with my hands: everything. For that fact alone, I love working with my hands. While I peel carrots, drive long distances, wash dishes, I also woolgather. Those sorts of tasks make a connection to my brain that doesn’t require the involvement of my conscious self. That state — a sensation of simultaneous...
Read MoreThis week’s column is by Scott Thybony. A scrawled note sat in my files for years: “Elvis has vision while crossing Arizona desert,” it stated. No date, no source. But after reading it again I couldn’t shake the idea of Elvis Presley wandering through the desert in a pair of blue suede shoes, searching for God. It didn’t exactly fit...
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The San Francisco Peaks practically whisper through the bedroom window of my upstairs apartment near downtown. Along with the tribes that consider the mountain sacred, I believe the rest of us should more frequently name how that mountain touches our lives. I know I count on the peaceful presence of the highest peak in Arizona. Many times a week I look...
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