Archives
How to love New Mexico again…with the passion I felt for this place the first years I lived here. Sometimes it’s easy. Yesterday morning for example. Steven and I walked from the river crossing above Rio Bravo south to Rio Bravo and back. Five and one-half miles. Starting just before 6 am and winding up at Modelos for a burrito and pineapple Fanta breakfast. Perfect. The bike path going down, right along… Read More
My friend Bob and I were going to be at the Other Bob’s concert last night. Damn virus. Since we’re all playing ‘Shelter From the Storm’ these days as a wishful-thinking exercise…here it is. Shelter From the Storm ‘Twas in another lifetime, one of toil and blood When blackness was a virtue the road was full of mud I came in from the wilderness, a creature void of form Come in, she… Read More
Steven’s the younger brother, the baby of our family. He just had a birthday, one of the many that are turning him into an aging baby…still the youngest though, and you know how they are…the babies/little brothers/littlest kids…really cute, but spoiled, right? And sometimes you wonder if they’ll ever grow out of a certain amount of coyness… Steve, I didn’t want to bring this up on your birthday but… about that toilet… Read More
Bread by Mahmoud Darwish From early dusk the day was inscrutableThe sun shows up, lazy as usualA mineral ash, eastward, blocks the horizon. . .In the veins of cloudsIn household pipesThe water was hard. . .A desperate autumn in the life of BeirutDeath spread from the palaceto the radio to the salesman of sexTo the vegetable marketWhat is it wakes you now?Exactly five o’clockAnd thirty people killedGo back to sleepIt is a… Read More
End of April, first week of May, friend Bob and I were going to be doing Broadway…he being a serious aficionado of Broadway musicals and me loving the modest number I’ve seen over the years. Bob Dylan’s Girl from the North Country was the central attraction but Dear Evan Hansen, West Side Story, and Hadestown were awaiting our presence as well. Spring in New York/New York, music, food, wandering…doesn’t get any better… Read More
Trees are the best plants of all. In their variety, their beauty, their practical and life-saving contributions to every other thing on the planet. I grew up spending long summer days roaming around in the woods, often with a book. I am a Dendrophile too (a person who loves trees, forests). Dead trees: battered trunks, broken branches, fallen logs, scattered limbs…in some ways more fascinating in their stark jagged shapes…almost threatening…prickly sticks… Read More
el rio grande The Rio grande flows from the continental divide like a golden thread, taking the loneliness out of the Colorado mountains. The eyes of dead apache warriors express their sorrow with silent renegade war cries, as the Rio grande meanders through New Mexico.Tooh-ba-aadi is an ancient Navajo word for a south flowing river. It flows through Tejas like a carancahua red cloth, it cuts through chihuahuas, coahuila, Nuevo Leon and… Read More
More time on bosque walks. Many delicious quotes and poems. Many photos. Many miles. Another morning in the woods tomorrow. This pathway through the pandemic. “With the first step, the number of shapes the walk might take is infinite, but then the walk begins to define itself as it goes along, though freedom remains total with each step: any tempting side road can be turned into an impulse, or any wild patch of woods… Read More
“That’s the best thing about walking, the journey itself. It doesn’t matter much whether you get where you’re going or not. You’ll get there anyway. Every good hike brings you eventually back home.” (Edward Abbey) “All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking.” (Friedrich Nietzsche) “I still find each day too short for all the thoughts I want to think, all the walks I want to take, all the books I want… Read More
PHOTOS, COURTESY SUMMER 2019. I’m lonely often these days. Not really a deeply depressive or even particularly sad loneliness. Just that feeling of wishing to see a person or place that’s not here… or go to time that’s not now. Sometimes wishing intensifies into longing…sometimes it’s just okay to think fondly of the missing piece. For today I’m thinking Minnesota. Last summer. Home. Water. Rivers. Lakes. It’s still cold up there, been… Read More