Reflections
Communion in the Differences
In the torpor of Tucson’s summer heat, it can be hard to think. I walk or bike along the Santa Cruz River at dawn, or even shoot hoops in the park. Then I hole up and focus on survival as temperatures soar. But here are three book reflections and some thoughts that simmer in my heat-muddled...
Protected by Giants
Just before dawn, stand in the cool desert. Eastward, a dark butte protects you from the light that soon will strike. The oblong moon hovers, waning, in pale silver sky. Walk, and your foot crunches the gravelly earth, loud in the silence. But then it isn’t silent, is it? Before and behind you birds make music. Skinny lizard skitters ahead of you. Farther on, a soft young cottontail disappears into the rattlebush. Wend between the sticky green leaves and furry-globe pods of creosote. Meander...
Summer Caravans: Oracle and Miracle
Caravans...
The Desert: Bright, Brave, and Beautiful
What comes to mind when you...
Before I Forget
Should I be surprised at how unnerving it is to write a memoir? My mother died of Alzheimer's disease, so someday I may forget who I have been. I better finish the story before it’s too late. I recently reread a poem I wrote years ago, a kind of memoir in fewer than two hundred words. It includes references...
Just Wondering
When I was in high school, I discovered a cure for anxiety-driven insomnia: sleeping outside. When I returned from a summer in Afghanistan between my junior and senior years, I suffered reverse culture shock. I’d lived a slow, down-to-earth life in Kabul, where homes seemed to grow out of the soil. I woke up to rooster crows and donkey brays...
A Healer’s Tree
The crucifix that once hung in Nada Hermitage’s Sangre de Cristo Chapel in Crestone, Colorado formed me. Created by Santa Fe artist Dan Davidson, it combined both wood and bronze. And instead of a dead Jesus with eyes shut and head to the earth, it portrayed an ambiguous moment just before death. The young...
Gaza: A Dark Night of Hope
We have not slept. Our entire city is haunted by the images, videos and stories streaming out of Gaza. Life seems heavily veiled in a haze of shared grief, fear, helplessness and even guilt as we try to understand how our tax dollars could be used by those we elected to slaughter our relatives overseas. Abdullah H. HammoudThese words from the Mayor of Dearborn, Michigan, haunt me. My ancestors came to America generations ago, so I cannot imagine what it feels like to be here, to love America,...
Fire and Light: Return to the Wild
Is wilderness important in our lives? In the latest Fire and Light podcast, Tessa and Dave describe a recent trip to Death Valley and reflect on what struck them most in that vast, wild, empty landscape. We discuss the “practice of the wild” and the joy of encountering our liberating smallness in communion with ancient stone and starlit...
Life in a Valley Called Death
It was a relief to get past Las Vegas en route to Death Valley. an open space we traversed reminded my friend Tessa and me of Colorado’s mountain-ringed San Luis Valley, where we once lived. But then we dipped southwest from Pahrump, Nevada, crossed a ridge and dropped into an alien world. Vegas was electrified urban surrealism. As we...