Hanging together—reluctantly
Edgewood is a tranquil rural village of pastures, mountains, cows and blue skies. This Edgewood is in northern California at the base of Mount Shasta, at 14,179 feet the tallest summit in the region and the second tallest anywhere in the Cascade Mountains.
Shasta’s year-round snowfield and five glaciers hang over Edgewood like a living presence, a white ghost exhaling pure, cold air over fields and homes. Rising some 11,000 feet above the village, the massive mountain doesn’t just dominate the skyline; it is the skyline. It is as if Sandia Peak rose 2 miles above Albuquerque instead of 1 mile and was sitting virtually on top of the city...
Weekly Poem: Silence of the Messengers
We hear only hush of wings
these angels who
sweep around us
never a word spoken
never a sword drawn
though their voices be strong, their hearts brave,
knowing we would not remember
if they spoke
would not remember one soft word
nor recall one firey blow...
Weekly Poem: The Spring
Like the way a spring seems
To rise, fresh, out of a silent earth,
So my words, once started,
Find their own way
From my equally silent depths.
I suppose the invisible machinery
Of my subconscious is involved,
But a poem is more than something
Stirred from darkly distorted memories of
My pasts...
The Most Beautiful Classroom in the World
The most beautiful classroom in the world lives in the middle of a Southwestern painting. The vaulting blue sky gives way to the magnificent whites of the billowing clouds--smoke signals from the gods. Their shadows fancy dance on the hills. Triangulated among the peaks of the Jemez, Sangre de Cristo, and Sandia mountains, our classroom provides a bridge from a traditional community to the modern world.
Each morning, a bus travels the dirt roads of the Pueblo and fills with bleary-eyed children. Nearly 900 years ago, these children’s ancestors settled the fertile soil near the confluence of the Galisteo and Rio Grande rivers...
The Taos Hum
The Taos hum has long been a mystery. Ever since 1956 residents of Taos County have periodically noticed what some have described as a low-frequency vibration, a deep rumble from the earth most often felt through the soles of the feet. They say it is most noticeable when barefoot, but there have been reports of some people sensing the rumble while wearing Birkenstocks. High heels and Gucci loafers seem to have a dampening effect on the vibration...
The New Deal Revisited in Symposium and Exhibit (This Saturday)
The New Deal lasted only a decade. But in that decade thousands of bridges in the country were refurbished or built new; thousands of miles of roads were built, hundreds of post offices, schools and community centers were built or festooned with New Deal art provided by unemployed artists, many products of the nation’s best art institutions.
Some of our national icons were completed during the period like the Golden Gate Bridge and Hoover Dam. Three million young men worked in Civilian Conservation Camps, many living outside their communities for the first time...
The Magic of Your Dreams
It’s one of the most important days in the life of Yeira Rubi Beltrán. Her quinceañera. She lives on the west side of Juárez with her brother, Hector and her grandmother, Elvira Romero in a shack with little protection against the rain and wind. To survive, they’ve often had to find scrap metal to sell along the highway. “They’ve suffered a great deal,” Elvira says.
I first met Yeira and Hector in March, 2011. Their grandmother, Elvira was the cook at the nearby mental asylum, Vision in Action that I visit every month...
Counter-Ad to Diesel’s Affront to Muslim Women
Media Literacy Project was disturbed by Diesel’s ad featuring a white woman in a niqab with much of her body exposed and tattooed, reading, “I am not what I appear to be.” Yes, the ad affirmed that women in niqabs are diverse and interesting, but it also was an affront to Muslim women’s modesty and cast their bodies as exotic. It enticed people to look at Muslim women and wonder what’s beneath the clothes, which is the antithesis of what this everyday piece of clothing is intended to do. It took the power away from Muslim women and put the emphasis on their appearance...
My Own California
Long before the Mamas and the Papas recorded their famous song 48 years ago, “California dreaming” was a national preoccupation, and it still is: the land of eternal spring, endless beaches, waving palms, bare sensuality, and men and women—in the title of another famous song by Bob Dylan—“Forever Young.”
These days I am spending a long bit of time in another California, where the mornings are foggy, the ocean is bitterly cold, and many of my neighbors are elderly and not at all rich. The roads are narrow and hilly, and most people, while polite, prefer to ignore their neighbors rather than socialize with them in suburban style. In such respects it is not much different from the East Mountains in New Mexico...
Weekly Poem: durable whiteness
still flayed by the swollen pelt racked by pain
durable whiteness
amidst the cracked red sea
a new landscape across my canvas
a new story
you orestes
me hypatia
alack...