Connecting People with Nature, and Writers with Words

If God Is In The Details: Metaphor, The Great Pandemic, and Hummingbirds

2012-01-06T08:57:00.006-07:00

A poem, and then a few thoughts on metaphor...

Headstones carry last century’s news etched into granite gone

green, lichen as cold as the shade side of an empty

house. I wait while he kneels at his son’s grave,
wander the brittle grass paths, find mothers
buried with newborns

Born

Died

The dates are the same. No span of life stretches
between them. I find brothers
and sisters, a wife,
then a child,
a husband – the Great Pandemic.

Grief is a familiar load. It bends us at the shoulders, buckles his knees

as I wander, waiting for the right time to go to him, the sorrow
of a town etched in each stone. Grave after
winter grave, I see where death
turned the calendar

December 1918

January 1919

Seven months later we return to the family plot. Too soon.
The soil hasn’t settled. They have piled a mound of cold earth on
his son’s grave, carving space for the wooden box that holds the
grandmother’s ashes.  A boy holding the earth. It should not be
so – life turned upside
            down
            like this

His mother is the first to toss rose petals, for these are her mother’s ashes

floating, the petals carried by a cold wind to both graves. I wait, watch

his father bend and reach into the basket. His large brown hand curls

softly around the red petals and I wonder, How does one let go

of such

a thing?

As a writer, I want to reach out and touch this experience without staring it harshly in the eye, without crassly naming it, as if such poignancy could be reduced to a few single words. If God is in the details, then I want to write the details in such a way that from these details symbolism rises.

Hummingbird by Sarah Rogers
www.sarahrogersart.com

In the 2012 January/ February issue of Poets & Writers, Dan Albergotti writes about metaphor, exploring “The Truth of Imagination” as seen through the lens of Melanie Carter’s poem, “Water to Sky” (first published in Shenandoah). The poem, on the surface, is about a hummingbird. But in just 14 lines, she captures a truth about the human experience. The fine throat “soaked through with red” shape-shifts into the “hook God dangles into this uncertain sea.” The wings “pluck the invisible line” and suddenly we realize that the “invisible line” that links water to sky is the very same line from which we dangle. The hummingbird becomes both bird and fish, as do we.

And God? Ah, the puppeteer, of course. The question arises from the metaphor, and is answered by the metaphor, yet in a way that none of us can articulate, nor hold in the palm of our hand, nor see with our naked eye. But we know it to be true—as weightless as the hummingbird, yet as substantial as the fistful of soil I might have held had I dared to bend at the grave and pick it up, tossing it, like the rose petals, into the cold winter wind.

BOTTOM NOTES: Rattles: Poetry for the 21st Century awards a $500 editors prize for the Annual Neil Postman Award for Metaphor. MANY THANKS to artist Sarah Rogers for permission to feature "Gary's Hummingbird." To view Sarah's available prints and originals, please go to Sarah Rogers Art. THANKS also to Robert Olen Butler, for reminding us in his book From Where You Dream, that the human condition resides in the details. Origin of "God is in the details."

Why Write? Paying Homage to Northern Lights aka Marry Your Dreams in 2012

2011-12-11T21:03:00.010-07:00

Sometimes I miss a certain place, like the aspen draw on the ranch in Wyoming where Thimbleberries grow thick by July, and where snow gathers by October, staying until May. Sometimes I miss a person, like the young Greek girl Antigone whom I barely knew, but knew well enough to lie on a hill near the Acropolis, beneath the light of a full moon counting the stars as they came out. “Ena Dio Tria Tessera,” she taught me, pointing at the sky. “One Two Three Four,” I echoed back.

Today, I am missing a magazine, and the vision that it brought to the world before publication ceased. Northern Lights, published by Deborah Clow O’Connor. "What does it mean to lose Northern Lights?" asked Charles Finn. "It is like asking what it means to lose a star from its place in the sky." WHY WRITE? asks The Center section of the Summer 1998 issue. The answers of seven writers were printed, including essays by Jane Hirschfield, Ellen Meloy, and C.L. Rawlins. But the piece that I saved, that draws my centered attention even now, was by Terry Tempest Williams. Dearest Deb, Terry begins…

I was dreaming about Moab, Brooke and I walking around the block just before dawn. I threw a red silk scarf around my shoulders and then I began reciting why I write: I write to make peace with the things I cannot control. I write to create a red fabric in a world that often appears black and white. I write to discover. I write to uncover. I write to meet my ghosts. I write to begin a dialogue. I write to imagine things differently and in imagining perhaps the world will change. I write to honor beauty. I write to correspond with my friends. I write as a daily act of improvisation. I write because it creates my composure. I write against power and for democracy. I write myself out of my nightmares and into my dreams… I write because it is dangerous, a bloody risk, like love, to form the words, to say the words, to touch the source, to be touched, to reveal how vulnerable we are, how transient. I write as though I am whispering in the ear of the one I love…

Lunar Eclipse 12/10/11

Terry's entire letter celebrates writing. Yet how different writing in this digital age feels, how easy to lose hope in the murky skies of this new electronic era. Yet don't we still write for the same reasons, even though it is a bloody risk? And don't we still seek the eyes and ears of the ones we love? Like painters and musicians and sculptors, our art celebrates life. Deb O'Connor, though no longer publishing a magazine, paints and explores the celestial world as a gifted astrologer and visual artist. "Who says the Universe doesn't have a sublime sense of humor," she begins her November 24, 2011 column. "A new and eclipsed moon the same day that Mercury goes backwards?"

It helps to have a sense of humor when we don't know if our writing is moving forward, or slipping backwards. Sometimes it helps to count to 4 and remember why we write. Why do you write? If you're in the mood to share, I would love to know. Shout it out to the world, if you want. Declare your intentions as if 2012 will be the year that you marry your dreams. Then make it so.

Learn more about astrologer Deb O'Connor's paintings and services.

Leave a comment.

Horse & Human: The Mysterious Link

2011-11-10T09:58:00.001-07:00

Horses have been studying humans from across the safety of a river, or from the overlook of a high ridge, or from across an expanse of grassland, for thousands of years. The oldest archealogical evidence links horses and humans as far back as 400,000 to 600,000 years ago, not as companions, but as prey and predator. When horse and human first touched because of a far more benevolent mutual curiosity, we may never know. But horses have been a part of the human heart, and of our history, for time immemorial.

We incorporate their beings into every aspect of our lives. We celebrate their presence in our art, our stories, our lives. You can view Chinese painter Xu Beihongat's beautiful images through January at the Denver Art Museum. In Washington, DC at the National Museum of the American Indian, the exhibit A Song of the Horse Nation, created by museum scholar Emil Her Many Horses, celebrates native arts and the horse, the impact of the horse, and the decline and revival of the horse.

Yes, horses are everywhere. Even on the covers of books guiding smart women in midlife back to their horse-filled girlhood dreams, like Melinda Folse's new book, The Smart Woman's Guide to Midlife Horses. "What about my dreams?" she wants us to ask ourselves. "Is it my turn yet?" But it isn't just women who understand the desire for a relationship with a horse. Back in the 1700s, British Lord Palmerston proclaimed, "The best thing for the inside of a man, is the outside of a horse." And then, of course, there's that well known cowboy poem by Gary McMahan, who asks only that when he dies, they make a saddle out of his hide and give it to a cowgirl so that he "may rest between the two things" that he loves the best!

But sadly, throughout the centuries, humans have not always thought about what was good for the inside of the horse. Horses have been our faithful friends, dying for us in battle, carrying our belongings from horizon to horizon, carrying our children and our dreams -- from the wind-swept steppes of Mongolia, to the alpine meadows of America, from a violent past, into an unknown future.

Photo by Gary Caskey

What is it like to view the world through the eyes of the horse? To understand a horse's relationship with human beings? Why do they allow us to ride on their backs? What ancient cellular memories do they hold inside of their elegant bodies? Why are we fascinated with stories like Black Beauty and The War Horse? How can their sensual and perceptive natures help us to interpret our own stories? How can we better serve horses, rather than just allowing them to serve us? Our debt to them is immeasurable, and universal.

Creating a place and time where we could reinvision our relationship with the horse, and with ourselves, even if only for 5 days, became an important goal of mine. This will be the 5th year I've returned to the beautiful Vee Bar Guest Ranch in Wyoming to lead the Literature & Landscape of the Horse retreat, co-facilitated by my friend Sheri Griffith, who has been leading outdoor adventures for 35 years. We knew that there must be other men and women in the world who shared deep-seated yearnings to connect with horses in a new, more grateful way.

The beautiful gray horse above is a member of the Vee Bar ranch remuda. To watch a short slideshow featuring some of the other Vee Bar horses and fun times from past retreats, click on this link, Click on 2012 June retreat for complete details. And don't worry if you've never ridden a mile, or written a word. All you need to bring to Wyoming is a willingness to open your heart to the landscape of the horse, and to the landscape of your dreams.

Alone in the West?

2011-10-28T22:05:00.003-06:00

THEY SAY WRITING IS A SOLITARY THING—as if we are all lone wolves howling into the wind with only the moon as our companion. Yet from the first writer’s conference I attended as a freshman at the University of Colorado in 1970, where Reader’s Digest managing editor John Allen befriended and encouraged me, to a 1996 reading at The Writer’s Voice in Billings, Montana, where Kim Barnes and I read from our memoirs, to the upcoming reading and panel discussion at The Tattered Cover for the new anthology West of 98: Living and Writing the American West, I have found writing to be about community.

Writers support other writers. Especially western writers. If author Laura Pritchett had not suggested my name to the editors of West of 98, my essay might not have found its way into the collection. Thank you, Laura! And had John Allen not tucked me under his wing when I was only 18, I might never have held onto this dream. But he did. And she did. And they did. And we all do.

Opening my contributor’s copy of West of 98, I see Kim Barnes’ name in the list of contributors, not far from mine. I read her essay and discover that we both have Oklahoma roots. She shares that she misses the backwoodsness of her upbringing—the stories of forest fires and widow-maker snags. At the end, she declares that she is bored by her "nice black pants and Italian leather boots and the sameness of every interview she has ever been drug through." It is a charming confession.

I turn to page 193 and read Laura’s essay. "I do not like to gut fish," she tells the reader. Then she confesses in a few lines that “I’m a ranch kid who now owns a Suburu, criss-cross suntan patterns are visible on my feet when I’m not wearing cowboy boots, and I am apt to fall in love with thoroughly western men, most particularly my husband.”

Does any other profession create the space for this kind of dialogue? Those of us who write personal narratives about the West don’t always have to gut fish, we’re often too busy spilling our own guts. But isn’t there something wonderfully vulnerable and trusting about that? About writing about the people and places that we love and hate, then casting these stories out into the world?

“Writing personal stories about the landscapes we love is a radical act,” I write in West of 98. “A protective act. A celebratory act. Even an act of desperation. It is also an intimate and sensual act. Sometimes I crave the western earth like food, or breath, or sex, or water…” I crave storytelling and storytellers in this same way too. They are my people--my tribe. Their community is my community. Our language is the language of lore and truth and connectedness. And even when it gets messy, I'll never toss this profession back.

NOTES: West of 98, edited by Russell Rowland and Lynn Stegner, is published by University of Texas Press. Please attend the reading and panel discussion at The Tattered Cover in Denver on November 5, 2011, at 7:30 pm. Contributors include Rick Bass, Ron Carlson, Gretel Ehrlich, Maxine Hong Kingston, Barry Lopez, Larry McMurtry, and more! Read more about Kim's first memoir, In the Wilderness: Coming of Age in an Unknown Country. Read Page's entire essay "A Shape-Shifting Land."

My Horse Agrees with Author D.H. Lawrence

2011-09-30T10:20:00.000-06:00

On stage for a "Page Wisdom"
segment at CampExperience 2011

My great religion is a belief in the blood, the flesh, as being wiser than the intellect. We can go wrong in our minds. But what our blood feels and believes and says, is always true. The intellect is only a bit and a bridle.

I like this quote from D.H. Lawrence (Lady Chatterly's Lover). When I get on my horse's back, he reminds me that we do best as a team if I ease up on the reins, and quit pulling on his head. Farside responds more quickly to gentle leg pressure around his center, his girth - when the calf of my left leg is close to his heart, that blood-pumping organ that propels us literally and metaphorically.

Page's daughter riding Farside
with halter and loose lead rope

Last weekend, at the 2011 CampExperience retreat, I asked the 240 women in the audience to stand up, grab a partner, and try to lead each other around by the head. Mayhem ruled until they switched their hands from their partner's head, to the middle, the core. Our bodies like balanced, centered movement. I think we like our stories that way, too.

Letting our hearts guide us as we move through each day is a good motto for life. Not that we should ignore the intellect, but too often we ignore the physical sensations the natural world sends us to inform each moment.

Good storytellers know how to engage the reader's sensory recall. With a few carefully chosen descriptive words, they tap into the reader's cellular memory bank and a scene comes alive. But what happens when we try to guide the characters in our stories with our intellect, rather than letting our "writing" heart lead us to what a character's heart would be feeling?

Drawing of Solar Plexus

What happens if we construct a plot outline, or a scene, without allowing our gut instincts to inform the process, and what is "gut instinct" anyway? The Solar Plexus - that ganglia of sympathetic nerves found below the sternum and above the diaphragm - is sometimes called our Primitive Brain.

In From Where You Dream, Robert Olen Butler begins Chapter 4 (The Cinema of the Mind) with this Pablo Picasso quote:

If only we could pull out our brains, and use only our eyes.

Dr. Christiane Northrup, in her book Women's Bodies, Women's Wisdom, claims that the "mind" and the "brain" are two different things, asking us to ponder the idea that the mind is in every cell of our body.

Next time I climb on my horse's back, or sit in the center of a story-in-progress, maybe I should try writing what my body "sees," instead of writing what my intellect "thinks." Maybe I should toss aside that bit and bridle and listen to what my gut is telling me.

NOTE: November 5, 2011, Page will be teaching a one-day workshop, THE YEARNING FACTOR, inspired by Butler's book From Where You Dream: The Process of Writing Fiction.

Eve Ensler's SUDDENLY, MY BODY: watch it, then write what matters

2011-08-11T13:42:00.004-06:00

I just watched Eve Ensler's powerful new 12-minute video on TED. I immediately wanted to reach out to all the women in my life. And to all the men who love but are confused by the women in their lives. Please don’t miss Suddenly, my body. Watch it with a friend. Watch it right now. Watch it tonight with a glass of wine or in the morning with a cup of tea. Watch it with your mother, or your daughter, or your husband, or your son. Watch it with your journal in one hand and a fistful of earth in the other.

Eve's story reminds us of our deep kinship with nature, of the emotional link between the bodies of women and the body we call Earth. If her story reminds you of your story, seek out a healing moment in a place of intrinsic beauty--a moment as perfect as a flitting butterfly poised on a wild flower. Let nature pollinate you. Let it feed your art. If you must choose between reading the rest of this post, or watching the video, please watch the video.

Sometimes on the river women talk about how we have gathered at the water’s edge for thousands of years, and so we feel at home there. Sometimes, during the horse retreats in Wyoming, we talk about how we are fooled by the strength and grace of horses until we see them bolt and run. We are reminded then that horses are prey animals and suddenly we understand their desire to flee because we understand our own desire to flee, even in the face of our human predatory nature.

We understand strength and aggression even as we understand what it is to be powerless. We understand that we are emotional creatures before we are cerebral creatures, extensions of the earth as aware of our own internal turbulence, as of the external storms which ravish our paved shorelines and plowed fields and thatched huts. Our emotions are rooted to the earth and for many of us, this truth informs our stories, our poems, our art. But for some of us, like Eve Ensler, our bodies--these rooted appendages of the earth--have become something alien and separate, apart from who we understand ourselves to be.

For many of us, to stay connected to our own flesh and blood, to our own emotions, is too painful. And so we disembody ourselves. We hold our emotions at arms length. We separate ourselves from the earth because we recognize her wounds as our wounds. We forget that when we walk on the earth, our footsteps are no different to the earth than are the cloven steps of a deer, or the fingerprint patterns of a crane.

Suddenly, my body, Eve Ensler’s impassioned new video on Ted.com, is difficult to watch. It is important to watch. It is about our relationship to ourselves and to the earth. If you get angry or filled with angst when you watch it, use these emotions to fuel your creative work. Embrace the earth as you would a lover, then ask her forgiveness and write what really matters.

Write what will change the world. Write what will heal the earth. Write with your pen dipped in humbleness and your heart lifted to your highest hopes.

NOTE: About Eve Ensler: The author of The Vagina Monologues, I first heard her speak in 2002 at a V-day fundraiser for the Cangleska Center for Women on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation near Rapid City, South Dakota. This week, August 9-11, 2011, Native women are gathered at Mystic Lake, Minnesota, for the 10th Annual Women Are Sacred Conference.

PHOTO CREDITS: Thank you to Pat Jurgens for the horse photo, and to John Gritts for the wild flower and field photo. If you watched the video, I hope you will share your thoughts by leaving a comment.

What do Butler's A Small Hotel, Louv's The Nature Principle, and Abram's Becoming Animal have in common?

2011-07-06T17:55:00.011-06:00

Well, for one thing, the first two book titles made the list of Oprah's top 27 summer reads. The third, Becoming Animal, should have, but didn't.

A Small Hotel, Robert Olen Butler's latest work of fiction, is an unapologetic romantic story of a couple in love for nearly 25 years but now in the throes of separation and divorce. (I first met Butler about six years ago at a Narrative Magazine fundraising dinner in Santa Fe, New Mexico.) Butler read from Intercourse, his 2008 collection of irreverant short stories that, through humerous paired dialogues, allow the reader to romp through imagined sexual moments of some very famous characters. It's a very "fleshy" book, but more about "connections" than separations, which is the theme of A Small Hotel.

Richard Louv's latest book, The Nature Principle: Human Restoration and the End of Nature Deficit Disorder is also about separation (you'll have to look a little harder for the sexuality, though one might argue that nature is all about sex). But I imagine the reason Oprah's edtiors included The Nature Principle in her list of top summer reads isn't because the book is about how adults have divorced ourselves from the very thing most deeply rooted in us - Nature - but more importantly, because the book gives us 7 very specific concepts for helping us restore our lives. The Nature Principle, writes Louv, "is about the power of living in nature—not with it, but in it."

What does it mean to be living in nature? Or to be living in a marriage? The hummingbird nestled among the petunias in my garden doesn't only live in nature; it is nature - an integral, organic part of the natural world. Dave Abram (Spell of the Sensuous) might say that all living things are actually organs of the world - allowing the world to perceive and continually recreate itself.

In Richad Louv's review of Abram's latest book, Becoming Animal: An Earthy Cosmology, Louv writes, "Abram offers a startling new exploration of our entanglement with the rest of nature. This time, his focus is the intimate but sadly forgotten relationship between our bodies and the earth. By excavating the most ordinary and familiar of our experiences ... he re-opens for us the knowing that our bodies are intertwined with the flesh of the earth."

Louv goes on to say, "I cannot imagine another book that so gently and so persuasively alters how we look at ourselves, and reminds us that sentience was never our private possession, that our very awareness is a means of participating in a more than human world..."

The word sentient is rooted in the belief that we become conscious of the world through what our senses perceive because we live in a sensual world. Animals that we are, it is through how we touch, taste, see, hear, and smell the world around us that allows us to live in the world. All these things help us to intuit the world and develop a conscious awareness of the world. Can you think of a recent moment when you felt keenly aware of your surroundings? When your ears perked and your nose twitched and your eyes flashed? When the hair on the back of your neck stood up, or your solar plexus tightened? I hope you'll share it with us by leaving a comment HERE.

Interesting links:

See NEWS for photos and info on Rich's June signing at the Tattered Cover Book Store. See Tom Jenk's essay in Narrative on editing Hemingway's The Garden of Eden. See what Pulitzer-prize winning author Robert Olen Butler has to say about the craft of writing in his book From Where You Dream.

Fierce and Hopeful Attachments

2011-06-12T10:12:00.003-06:00

I have a file box on my desk next to my Storyteller Doll with clippings torn from magazines and newspapers -- uplifting stories of people reconnecting to the land. These stories appear in diverse publications, like Native Peoples Magazine and High Country News, or The Quivira Coalition Journal and the Nature Conservancy, even the World Ark and The Denver Post.

The Omeg family in Oregon has planted blanket flowers and catmint around the perimeter of their cherry orchard so that threatened bumblebees, mason bees, and even sweat bees will have blossoms to sustain them. In the heart of Navajo country, Tammy Herrera is reconnecting people to the land and helping teach horsemanship to youth through a feral horse 4-H program (see pg.22 of pdf).

In a small Amazon village in the Oiapoque region of northern Brazil, children are helping to restore native populations of tracaja, the green and yellow river turtles. In Colorado, prison inmates are training mustangs that are later ridden by patrolmen, reviving an old alliance between human and horse.

In the fertile valley of Willamette, Alicia and Tyler Jones have found a way to compete with the nation's 4 mega-big poultry processors by building their own processing greenhouse, and small farmers are being linked to local food programs through the "Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food" Federal initiative.

The youth of the Poarch Creek Tribal Council in Alabama are planting rivercane, restoring this sacred plant to the environment where it once traditionally thrived.

These stories find their way into print not just because they are newsworthy but because, as many of us find our own intimate connection to nature diminishing, we seek encouraging stories that remind us of the ways we are still intimately connected. And even when we have found ways to live our lives within the natural world, we still seek opportunities to reconnect ourselves to THE LANDSCAPES THAT HOLD OUR STORIES.

How does a landscape "hold" a story? Ron Rash, author of the New York Times bestselling novel SERENA, when asked how places are fundamental to his identity as a writer, responded: "There's a wonderful term the Welsh use, cynefin, for a primal, fierce attachment to a part of a landscape. I have read that this attachment can be so fierce that when sheep are sold the owners have to sell the land along with the flock. The sheep cannot adjust to any other landscape; they become so disoriented ... When I write a novel, I want that same fierce attachment to the landscape..."

Do you have a "fierce attachment" to a landscape? Have you written about your connection to this place? Have you ever tapped into this fierce, personal connection and used it to fuel a character's love of place? Without a physical geography in which to root ourselves--a place to care for and which cares for us--we cannot orient ourselves within the larger context. Life itself becomes devoid of life. It's true.

Note: Photo of woman (Donna R.) perched on rock was taken by Alice Liles during the 2011 Literature & Landscape of the Horse retreat. Alice writes about her special place at The Bright Lights of Muleshoe.

SHARE YOUR STORIES OF CONNECTION BY LEAVING A COMMENT.

Inside the DAM: Roxanne Swentzell, Mud Woman, and The Whisper of the Land

2011-04-24T11:44:00.006-06:00

Sometimes, the most memorable moments for an artist or writer are hidden. Sometimes our work itself is hidden.

Several weeks ago Roxanne Swentzell told me over dinner and a glass of Blue Moon that she had inserted a PVC pipe into Mud Woman’s center to stabilize the 10-foot-tall sculpture. “But now I have this space that runs from her head to her heart,” she said. “I need to put something special in it. Maybe you have a poem about Denver?”

Mud Woman is monumental—certainly not hidden. The Denver Art Museum commissioned Roxanne to create the piece for their new Native American exhibit and, after months of planning, Mud Woman is coming to life. The sculpture, officially named Mud Woman Rolls On, is the first thing that greets visitors when they step off the 3^rd floor elevator of the DAM, Denver’s world class art museum.

Roxanne, a world class sculptor, will be working on the piece all spring and summer. Rox is from the Santa Clara Pueblo in New Mexico. Her roots go back thousands of years. She knows intimately the land her ancestors have walked for generations. But she doesn’t know Denver like I do. Denver is the land of my birth and as a descendent of this city, like everyone else born here, I have inherited the responsibility of keeping the city’s stories alive. It’s not a responsibility I take lightly. And Rox knows that.

To Rox, Mud Woman isn’t just a Roxanne Swentzell sculpture either. Mud Woman belongs to Denver. She is being birthed here—shaped with sand and mud and straw by Rox’s intuitive, artistic hands (and occasionally with a little help from museum visitors). Rox doesn’t analyze as she sculpts, though, she feels. “When it feels right, I just know it. This piece is telling us a story, a story about generations and our connection to the Earth.”

Credit: RMA U.S. Army historic photos

When Roxanne was telling me about the hollow core running from Mud Woman’s head to her heart, and the need to honor that space, shivers ran down my spine. Mud Woman had a shaft leading to her heart, an empty space that deserved to be filled. Denver, too, had a shaft—a deep injection well built in 1961 at the Rocky Mountain Arsenal, once known as the most "polluted square mile on earth." In 1942, the Army purchased over 19,000 acres of prairie and farmland near Denver and the War Board announced the location would be the site of a chemical manufacturing center (toxic nerve and mustard gas production). In 1961, the Army drilled two miles down into the earth and during the next 5 years poured 165 million gallons of toxic waste into the shaft. The well was capped in 1966 after more than 1300 earthquake tremors shook the Denver area.

Even though I grew up in the foothills west of Denver, and near the Platte River south of Denver, I remembered nothing of this incident until doing research for my novel, All the Water Yet to Come (also a work-in-progress). Maybe, I thought, we could make a small atonement for this grievous injury done to the earth—place a few healing objects inside of Mud Woman.

Perhaps she could even carry Denver’s history inside her, from the first glacial age that came to the land when the winds and waters formed the gently rolling hills through which the waters of Cherry Creek and the South Platte would someday flow. Even the stories of Sand Creek. Even the stories of “the greening of the Platte” when the entire city worked together to cleanse the river so that ducks could nest along her banks once more, and children could swim in her waters.

“Yes,” I said, “I can give you a poem—a love song to Denver that will honor the stories that lie buried beneath her paved streets and high rises.” Rox smiled. “That would be good.” And then, simultaneously, we both grinned. “And quartz. Some rose quartz from the mountains.” That’s how it came to be that a few weeks later, Roxanne and I, and my partner John Gritts and Rox’s husband Tim Star, gathered at the museum for a small ceremony to fill Mud Woman’s center with a few heartfelt objects, including my long prose poem, “Whisper of the Land.”

Heather Nielsen, Master Teacher for Native Arts at the Museum, asked us to explain the significance of each object while a staff member videotaped us. Then Roxanne climbed the ladder up to Mud Woman and placed each object inside her, including the breast feather from an eagle that John (of the Cherokee Nation) gave her.

Two weeks later, Roxanne and I taught an all-day teachers' workshop at the DAM, and Rox asked me to read from the poem as we sat gathered by the sculpture.

The soul of the city is here, in the heartbeat of the people. The land still stirs beneath our feet, beneath the asphalt and concrete and high-rise buildings. Creation’s afterglow is still here, on the faces of all the strangers we meet. Listen. Mud Woman is talking. She is the whisper of the land, the shout of the people, the sorrow of the city. She is us.

Read complete poem/essay on News page.

Postscript: Since the 1980s, the Rocky Mountain Arsenal has made great reclamation strides to return the land to health. Not only have bison been reintroduced to the shortgrass prairie, but the RMA National Wildlife Refuge also has a breeding pair of eagles that have fledged a dozen eaglets. Learn about the Rocky Mountain Wildlife Refuge.

Celtic Blood, Cherokee Blood, and Nature's Earthly Spirits

2011-03-24T10:24:00.005-06:00

Helen Terry Dunton c. 1912

When I asked my redheaded Great Aunt Violet, who died many years ago but in whose western saddle I still ride, to tell me what she remembered about my paternal grandmother, she said, "Well, besides being a crack shot with a rifle, Helen was part Irish, and part Cherokee, and that wasn't a very good thing to be back then." Aunti Vi was from the Dunton clan, my father's clan. "We have Scots blood," was the pronouncement, and I took it to mean that Scots blood was somehow superior to the Irish blood my grandfather had married into. The Cherokee blood was rarely mentioned, and never with "princess" lineage claims.

Beyond the American Pale

In David M. Emmons book, Beyond the American Pale: The Irish in the West, 1845-1910, he points out interesting contrasts between the "wild" Catholic Irish, and the more respected Scots Irish who had been the Protestant dissenters. And he draws interesting parallels between England's attempts to rid Ireland of the Irish, and America's attempt to rid America of it's Native Americans. "Both peoples had 'a wealth of folk tales and a host of legends...and strange beliefs touching every native plant and animal...for the Irish, every cave, rock, inlet, cove, headland, hillock, hill, drumlin, rill, pond, and bog and all who lived in, on, over, and under them had a name."

photo from Celtic Lady blog artist unknown

I am drawn to the old clan systems of the Irish and the Scottish, and to their beliefs (not strange at all) that all of nature is inhabited by spirits--not supernatural spirits, but earthly spirits. Perhaps the Little People of the Cherokees have more in common with leprachauns than we know. Both cultures were also constantly telling and renewing their own oral histories. And a good thing, Emmons points out, for the written histories of these tribal peoples were being penned by their conquerors. "The Irish, after all," Emmon writes, "had no money to bribe the historians." And being "cattle folk as the Indians were buffalo hunters...'they would rather have cow dung than soil' on their hands."

Chief Cherokee John Ross circa 1835

This quote will make you want to read Emmon's chapter "Savage Twins" cautiously. I question the statements that generalize (such as implying that all Indians were buffalo hunters). Or this one: "Neither people had well established work habits," he writes. "Both were materially poor beyond powers of description." He seems to draw his conclusions from post-contact historians and anthropologists (none of them Native to my knowledge). It's interesting to note that had the Cherokee leaders NOT been prosperous in the early 1800s, both in land and culture, and had the literacy of the entire Cherokee Nation and the Cherokee Supreme Court not been a threat to the encroaching nonliterate immigrants, and had the gold on the Cherokee land not been coveted, the Trail of Tears might never have been forced upon them.

Scottish Highlanders: Indian Peoples

For years, when I thought of Ireland and Scotland, I thought of our family's visits to both countries in 1964, of heather covered hills and stone cottages, of thatched roofs where flowers bloomed, of the Celtic blood in my grandmother's veins. But it wasn't until I started research on my novel Shifting Stars that I began to understand the intermingling of culture and blood between the Scottish and Native Americans. And it wasn't until Joe McDonald, president at the time of Salish Kootenai Tribal College in Pablo, Montana, gifted me with a copy of Scottish Highlanders: Indian Peoples, Thirty Generations of a Montana Family that I realized that the Montana McDonald's traced their roots back to the great chiefs of the Nez Perce Indians. No doubt, there really is an Indian "princess" in their ancestry. And no doubt, earthly spirits still inhabit the mountains and creeks and rocks and trees of their homelands.

What are the legends of your homelands? Do you feel the presence of earthly spirits when you walk the familiar trails of your childhood? Are you drawn to particular historical settings when you're browsing the bookshelves for a new novel to read? Perhaps your ancestors are whispering in your ear.

NOTES: Read about the top 30 Celtic blogs at Celtic Lady. Read more about Shifting Stars. Search the Native Authors website for books on traditional storytelling, legends, and beliefs.

Research is not a dirty word. Or: A story about an elk, an eagle, and two-hearted women

2011-03-09T11:52:00.004-07:00

Bull elk on Lookout Mountain
in snowstorm

Writing is not just about what we already know. It's also about what we wish we knew. At this juncture, where facts and experience meet curiosity, inspiration takes root. Passion and our emotional connection to a story may form the heart, but research gives a story legs; it keeps the story moving forward and keeps writer and reader engaged. Research is exploration. It is venturing into unknown territory, and the tension created between knowing, and not knowing, like a taut rubber band, can catapult us into someplace new.

Take this elk, for instance. Large antlers serve bull elk well during the rut, when they're sparring to test strength and endurance and hopefully gather up a harem of cows. But twice this winter, my neighbors and I have seen big bulls tangle with the orange plastic mesh fencing used on construction sites. This particular bull is a member of the large herd that lives here in our mountain community, and we've all been concerned about him. "When do elk shed their antlers?" a neighbor asked. "March or April," I answered, then I called my son in Montana to confirm. "Yep," he said, "late winter or early spring."

I call this grassroots research. And it piqued my curiosity. Eventually the antlers end up on the forest floor where they provide calcium for chipmunks, squirrels, mice, and other rodents. You can tell a rodent-chewed antler by the teeth carving. I found this ornamental tine when hiking on our Wyoming ranch several years ago. What causes elk or deer to shed their antlers? Lowered testosterone levels (which vary from animal to animal) cause the bond where the antlers join the pedicle to weaken. I learned that

Deer tine found in the Black Hills

when I was involved with the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, but I went online to verify. Since I'm not a wildlife biologist, I also have to trust what my wildlife biologist friends tell me. I call these second-hand resources, which lead to half-assed but well-intentioned and oftentimes reliable research.

Even Jack London had to rely on second-hand research. Many of the tales he wrote, and we love, he first heard sitting in the Klondike bars up at Dawson in the Yukon.

Photo by Gary Caskey Photography,
Vee Bar Guest Ranch, Wyoming, during 2009
Literature & Landscape of the Horse Retreat

Here's another example of second-hand research. Yesterday, I was sifting through my journals looking for passages that explored the sounds of the Colorado Plateau through the written word. We are quiet, I wrote last year at Black Rock in Westwater Canyon, even before we see the eagle's dark mottled body enter the blue breath of morning. Then the young eagle whistled, a long high-pitched piping that echoed from the canyon walls. Only I hadn't written the word "piping" in my journal. That word made its way into my revised journaling only yesterday, when I happened onto Cornell Lab's site, All About Birds.

What is familiar is comfortable. What is unknown, is worth pursuing, at least for writers. Writers are, if nothing else, hunters of words and story. We are studies in contradiction, enjoying our comfort zones yet always yearning to move beyond them.

This dual dynamic exists in our most memorable characters, too, who are often contradictions with opposing forces pulling at them. Years ago, when a female character began forming for my novel All the Water Yet to Come, I heard Colorado poet Anita Jepson-Gilbert read her poem "Everywoman" (the title poem of her new and powerful collection).

Everywoman

harbors two hearts one faithful and

Roxanne Swentzell & Rose Simpson
during 2009 river trip with Page

wise as swallows
who return each year
to churches barns
to nest with mate and
brood solidly against the wall
shielded from shearing wind
the storms of chance

but deep beneath the bones
encased and bolted tight
she bears another heart
flapping raptor wings
that ache for solitary flight
to scale the sky
to heights unkown
then plunge to earth
in wild pursuit.

As writers, we must explore - we must allow our creative vision to soar, but we must then tether our words to the rock-solid earth with research that will give our stories and poems a lasting foundation.

To purchase Everywoman, contact Anita Jepson-Gilbert.
Post a comment about this article by Page Lambert.

Behind the Chutes: Filmmaker Ann Lukacs On the Art of Storytelling

2011-02-22T14:56:00.047-07:00

Ann Lukacs shooting from helicopter

I first met award-winning filmmaker Ann Lukacs in Gunnison, Colorado back in 2004 when I was speaking at a Writing the Rockies conference. My topic, "Embracing Passion: In Our Stories and In Our Lives," seems to be a guiding motto for Ann, too. Last Tuesday, she was the keynote speaker at Dr. Ellie Greenberg's Feminist luncheon in Denver (Greenberg is the co-author of In Our Fifties: Men and Women Reinventing Their Lives and of A Time of Our Own: In Celebration of Women Over Sixty), where she shared with us her journey as a filmmaker, and her devotion to the story beneath the photos.

A Time Of Our Own

A few of Ann's professional credits as a cinematographer include Pirates of the Caribbean, The Bucket List, Honeysuckle Rose, Blues Brothers, and Coal Minor's Daughter. Check out the New York Times for a list of movies featuring more of Ann's work behind the camera.

photo by Ann Lukacs

But the movie that seems closest to Ann's heart is the documentary Behind the Chutes.

"This is a project of the heart which has been inspired by one reason only," Ann says, "the passion of these cowboys..." In Behind the Chutes, Ann follows several professional bareback riders on the rodeo circuit, meeting their families, learning their stories, becoming their friends. "What is it about these men that makes them want to devote so much of their life to an eight second ride?" Ann asks. "What is it about the ride that creates such an addictive passion? And what makes a man, years later, get that sparkle in his eye when he reminisces about his rodeo days? Why do you put it all on the line for eight seconds?"

Brent Kilmer, Vee Bar co-owner, at
Page's 2009 Literature & Landscape
of the Horse retreat, Wyoming

These were the questions that motivated Ann to perch precariously atop bucking chutes, or lie belly-down in the dirt, propping her camera up with her elbows. "Rodeo is a very misunderstood sport yet it is involves the traditions of our western American heritage--cowboys. Life on the ranch led to competition and a sport evolved using actual skills required in a work situation. It still embodies the uniqueness of a cowboy's life."

Some argue that keeping alive the cowboy legend is perpetuating a myth. But this photo of a mother cow and calf, with Brent Kilmer of the Vee Bar coiling up his rope after ear-tagging the newborn calf and iodining its umbilical cord, is not about myth, it is about the gritty reality of making a life, and a living, on the land. Not all rodeo cowboys come from working ranches, but they all have a story.

Boot-race fundraiser at college rodeo, Guyman, Oklahoma, 2010

Look closely at this photo, taken a year ago at a college rodeo in Oklahoma. You'll notice a bunch of cowboy boots piled up in the middle of the arena. And the cowboys are riding in their socks. This "boot race" Calcutta fundraiser was for a young girl with cancer - first cowboy to dismount, find his boots, pull 'em on, remount, and make it across the finish line, wins, and the spectator who "bought him" wins too. But the real winner is the fund to wish the proceeds will be donated. The event suddenly has far more meaning because we now know the story behind the photo.

"The art of storytelling," Ann tells us, "isn't confined to pages in a book. We have become a media driven society with immediate access to visual content. But no matter what the format, the basics of any good production remain the story structure and concept." Ann's newest project, There Are No Milk Runs, a story of WWII B-17 aviators has a fascinating synchronistic aspect in both structure and concept, so stay tuned for updates.

Human beings are natural storytellers. We seek out metaphor and meaning in our own personal narratives, and in the stories of our families and our communities. It is how we make meaning of our lives. And thanks to amazing filmmakers like Ann Lukacs, we can see these stories unfold not only on the page, but on the screen - in beautiful, living color.

Note: Click HERE to read about the regulations governing the use of livestock during PRCA sanctioned professional rodeos. Click HERE for details on the 2011 Literature & Landscape of the Horse retreat at the Vee Bar Guest Ranch in Wyoming.

Click HERE to leave a comment or scroll down to read comments and leave a reply. Thank you.

The Moral Dilemma of My Mother's Mink: Earning Our Place in the World

2011-02-02T12:31:00.010-07:00

My mother’s mink stole and two fur collars, one sable, one white, have been hanging in the back of my closet since she died five years ago. I remember how beautiful she looked to me as a child when she wore her mink—how the soft fur graced her bare sloping shoulders and showed off her own mother’s strand of pearls—how proud my father looked as he offered my mother his arm. The mink stole symbolized to my father his ability and desire to provide for my mother (not unlike what his grandfather must have felt when he dragged a deer back to his waiting wife).

Old Fugate Sawmill, Stringtown, OK
read essay

My grandmother never wore a mink stole, though. She had been born in Indian Territory—the child of a laboring, mixed-blood family that logged for the railroad companies as they laid track from Arkansas and Kentucky and Oklahoma west to Washington. Judging from old family photos, they ate a lot of deer meat—and rabbit. Members of the weasel family, no doubt, provided food and fur and oil. Families of old had far more intimate relationships with the weasel family than our family ever did. My mother (like millions of other modern women) used medical and cosmetic products that included mink oil, which has been a coveted oil since the paths of man and mink first crossed—intimate uses but without intimate knowledge.

Old Mink traps, Lookout Mountain

It’s unlikely that the minks that gave their lives for my mother’s fur stole ever swam in a river or frolicked in a creek. More likely, the mink were some of the hundreds or thousands raised in mink farms (post Civil War enterprises), perhaps even on a mink farm here in Colorado. There used to be a mink farm in the foothills community where I grew up, which I remember visiting once. I do not remember seeing injured animals (though you’ll see a lot of those on undercover YouTube videos now). But I do remember the trapped look in their eyes, the anxious pacing in some, the resignation in others. The remnants of those mink cages lie in a draw beside one of my favorite hiking trails.

Mink: Colorado Division of Wildlife

In the wild, mink travel. Constantly. They have large territories. More than fifty percent of all mink deaths in the wild happen in fights over territory. Less than half will live beyond their first year. At least these mink, even as they fight “like wolverines” for the right to claim a certain stretch of river, die fighting for something they love. Anthropomorphism? Perhaps, and it’s about time.

AICF Gala, Denver, Colorado

Last winter, during a blizzard in Denver (much like what the rest of the country is experiencing now), I attended an elegant fundraising gala hosted by the American Indian College Fund. As I was getting dressed, and as the storm raged, I thought about wearing my mother’s mink stole. The fact that it had been shoved to the back of my closet for five years, along with the fur collars, and hadn’t been worn for at least twenty years prior to that, seemed like the final affront to the dignity of the animals that had given their lives.

As I reached into the back of my closet and stroked the soft fur, this question reared its head: If an animal has already died, and if that animal’s fur has already been made into a coat, does one not dishonor the animal by not wearing the coat? I’m not asking whether it’s moral to farm animals for their fur; or immoral to know so little about where the clothing on your back comes from. I’m asking about the morality of not letting something go to waste. If a deer is killed by a car, should the meat be taken to a raptor rehab facility?

Tracks in the Snow

I wish I had known these mink—seen them roaming the woods around our house, watched them snag trout from a mountain stream, glimpsed their new litters of kits each spring, perhaps seen them grow one last winter coat before being lured into a trap. If I had been the one to check the trap, to know the feel of every bone beneath every inch of fur, then perhaps this intimacy would have somehow lent balance to the taking. But I wasn’t, and I didn’t. I inherited the furs without this deeper knowing.

How do we earn our place
in the world?

Perhaps all this shadowy introspection, this search for meaning and healing “in the blood of the wound itself,” is really a search for relationship. What is my relationship with the earth that sustains me? How do I sustain the earth? What covenant can I forge with all the things that live because of me, and all the things that die because of me? And if heartfelt relationship isn’t enough to earn us our place in the world, then what is?

Note from Page: CLICK HERE for information on how to donate used furs to help in the rehabilitation of injured and orphaned wildlife (“Coats for Cubs” program, The Humane Society of the

United States).

TAKE THE POLL: Should Page have worn her mother's mink stole? Scroll to the top of the essay to vote.

SHARE YOUR THOUGHTS: please leave a comment.

Can you trace the heart of your story? Great racehorses like Secretariat can.

2011-01-14T14:31:00.017-07:00

Several years ago, I read the essay "Mt. T's Heart," by novelist Jane Smiley, the first essay in the collection The Greatest Horse Stories Ever Told. I've been fascinated by the idea of "great hearts" ever since--both the hearts of horses, and the hearts of stories. If the stories we love to read over and over again endure because of this hard-to-measure quality, how can we ensure that the heart of the story we're writing now will tick on and on? If you could weigh the heart of your story—feel its pulse in the palm of your hand—could you trace its genetic greatness back to the works of the authors whom you most admire? Would there be a “felt” line of descent between your story and the first story you ever read as a child that made your heart race, perhaps Mary O’Hara’s My Friend Flicka or John Steinbeck’s The Red Pony? What do I mean by “felt line of descent?” Let’s use a metaphor and explore the literal and figurative “heart” of the race horse, SECRETARIAT. Like any great character (and any good character sketch), his story starts long ago…

Once upon a time (actually, it was Apri1 1, 1764), in a country whose coasts stretched between the Irish Sea to the northwest, the Celtic Sea to the southwest, and the North Sea to the east, a chestnut Thoroughbred colt was born. His owner the Duke of Cumberland christened the stud colt Eclipse and sold him to a sheep dealer. The sheep dealer sold half-interest in the horse to Captain O’Kelly, who was married to a brothel owner.

Eclipse would go on to be one of the world’s great racehorses. He died in 1789 and, as was the tradition in England, just his head, heart, and hooves were buried (now wouldn’t that make for a gripping scene). When the London surgeon performing the autopsy cut him open, he found that the racehorse had a massive heart weighing 14 pounds—6 pounds heavier than the heart of an average horse.

Pocahontas with colt

But greater even than Eclipse’s fame as a racehorse was his fame as a sire. In 1837, forty-eight years after his death, a progeny filly with a rather small frame was born. They named her Pocahontas and, though they didn’t know it at the time, she carried an X chromosome passed onto her by Eclipse’s daughter Everlasting. 150 years later this “large heart” gene would be passed down to one of the greatest horses the world has ever known.

In 1973 (the same year Jonathan Livingston Seagull was at the top of the bestseller list), Secretariat won the Triple Crown, setting track records and world records at the Kentucky Derby, the Preakness, and the Belmont. He died at the age of 19 after siring more than 600 colts. His heart wasn’t put on a scale and weighed as Eclipse’s had been, but the veterinarian who performed the autopsy estimated the great champion’s heart at more than 22 lbs. He was a power-house.

Secretariat's Meadow

Secretariat was known by those who loved him as an animal with “great heart,” not just because of his stamina, but because of his passion for competing. Kate Chenery Tweedy, who has loved him since her bell-bottom teenage days when she walked the same meadow as he did, shares his story in the exquisite new book, Secretariat's Meadow, co-authored with Leeanne Ladin.

How, then, does a heart fuel not only our legs, but also our dreams? How can a heart urge us to go the distance in the face of overwhelming obstacles, urge us to remain loyal in the face of betrayal, or urge us to keep writing that novel, or poem, or memoir, despite all odds against publication? These are the questions that some of our greatest authors explore, filling the pages of the books we love with stories of champions whose victories cannot be measured by mere physical stamina or prowess, but who are heroic because they lift someone else up even as they themselves are falling down. Or, like John Steinbeck’s heroes, perhaps they are heroic not because of their greatness but because of their frailties. In Mary O’Hara’s young adult novel My Fiend Flicka, I could feel my own heart racing as young Ken McLaughlin rode down the mountain after seeing Rocket’s filly for the first time:

No dream he had ever had, no imagination of adventure or triumph could touch this moment. He felt as if he had burst out of his old self and was something entirely new—and that the world had burst into something new too. So this was it—this was what being alive meant—Oh, my filly, my filly, my beautiful—

Heart-filled prose. But Mary O’Hara didn’t finish Ken’s sentence for the reader. Instead, she left it to our imaginations, perhaps even to our pens. I like to think that she hoped we would write our own everlasting stories—ones that will be felt pulsing in the palms of the reader’s hands even as we race toward the finish line.

Kate Chenery Tweedy signing at
Denver Women's Press Club

Look toward that finish line. See who has gone before. Imagine their words and stories leading the way. Visualize that line of descent. Thank those who have already run the race for us, marking the trail, then look behind you and visualize those whose stories will follow yours, and cheer them on as well. I think this is what inspired Kate as she entered the emotionally-wrought terrain of her upbringing as the daughter of Penny Chenery, and as she walked in the same meadow where Secretariat had run. "I thought about the love in people's voices as they talked about their Meadow days," Kate writes at the end of the book. "In the end, it was the land that made them all." Take heart, and let the stories that have come before inspire you as well.

January 16-18, Kate Chenery Tweedy will be at the North American Veterinary Conference, Orlando, FLA signing books. Important Links: Event Calendar for Secretariat's Meadow. Author Leeane Ladin's Book Tour Blog. Free Rein Blog Talk Radio featuring Secretariat.

The Votes areTallied!

2011-01-02T15:27:00.005-07:00

Thanks for voting everyone! It was a close race but WRITERS OVER 40 ROCK won by a nose as your favorite blog post of 2010. Wonder what the winning blog vote indicates about the average age of my readers? It means you all rock!!

WildLives: A Letter to Susan Tweit

2010-12-31T18:49:00.003-07:00

Dear Susan ... It is New Year's Eve, a cold, wintry day and I am listening to your CD WildLives while some holiday shortbread is baking. What a lovely surprise to receive the compilation--thank you for this unexpected gift.

A few hours ago, when I decided to do some baking, I searched among the few recipes I brought with me when I left the ranch in the Black Hills six years ago, but the shortbread recipe was not among them. The recipe had been my college roommate's, passed onto her by her Scottish grandmother. A much treasured thing, it was handed over to me with a certain amount of ceremony and was probably the first holiday cookie on which my children cut their toddler teeth.

But today I had to phone a dear friend in the Black Hills to retrieve a copy of the recipe, an especially poignant reminder that sometimes we must leave behind the things we cherish most.

As I listen to the WildLives CD, I hear your confident, soft voice speak about the pungent fragrances of juniper and piñon, yet it is the scent of of sweet butter baking that I smell, a warm, delicate fragrance--like the best of our memories, yes? Fleeting, but intimately familiar to each and every cell of our body.

I wish for you and Richard this coming year an abundance of delicate, melt-in-your mouth experiences, served up with laughter and smiles and all the dears friends who have traveled this journey with you.

I am reminded that though the place we call home may change, we may always choose to create a home wherever we are. Perhaps that is the greatest gift of all.

Blessings, and Happy New Year to all of you.

Page

Note: This is a slightly expanded version of the original letter. To purchase WildLives: Celebrating the World Around Us, or listen to an excerpt, click here. Contact Page for her shortbread recipe.

The Giving Nature of Trees, NPR's Morning Edition, and Sexing Your Pinecones

2010-12-16T08:35:00.006-07:00

This silence in the timbers.

A woodpecker on one of the trees taps out its story.
Robert Haight*

Each tree, too, has its own story, its own family, its own tribe. And even though we do not know if they give their lives willingly, we could not live or breathe without them. We fell them for their timber, for fuel for our fireplaces, and to grace our homes during the Christmas season. We thin them to allow other nearby trees to mature and to help prevent insect infestation.

In the small mountain community where I live, hundreds of

Douglas fir and Ponderosa pines are being selectively felled for fire mitigation. We are using the straightest of the “poles” to build a new barn for our community herd of horses, a bittersweet project because the trees must die.

But by this time next year, the barn will be built and the horses will be able to seek shelter on the leeward side, protected from the wind and rain and snow. I walk the dirt road where the cutting is taking place and touch the stumps that remain, inhaling the turpentine scene of pine and gather small armfuls of green branches to take home. I am glad we are not using pre-fab metal for the barn. Last weekend, John and I hiked the forest in search of a homegrown Christmas tree, one that we could take home and decorate. We found a crowded cluster of saplings, each struggling for their own meager bit of sunshine. We selected three which, when held together, formed a scrawny tree at which even Charlie Brown would have laughed.

Standing next to the stand of saplings, surrounded by a family of older trees with crowns that swayed 75’ above us, we said a few prayerful words of gratitude, then headed home. We used duct tape to bind the three small trunks together to form one trunk, and hoisted a few drooping branches off the rug with strands of sewing thread. The delicate branches couldn’t support anything but the lightest of ornaments. We wound three strands of lights and ribbon garland among the branches to fill in the bare spots. The angel perched on the top was too heavy so we suspended her from the ceiling with more thread.

The effort was comical. But in the end, we were charmed by the three small saplings and what they represented— the simple strength of a three-legged stool, the thematic unity of a trilogy, the belief in the strength of a common purpose, even the spiritual message of the trinity. And equally profound—the importance of honoring the essence inside each and every living thing. I wish you a simple season, full of simple pleasures and simple blessings. But most of all, I wish for you the chance to walk in the woods with a loved one, to stand beneath a blue sky surrounded by a family of trees and listen to the tapping of woodpecker or the song of the chickadee, to touch the bough of an evergreen and rekindle your faith in the innate goodness of the world.

Links of Interest

*Lines of poetry excerpted from "How Is It That The Snow" by Robert Haight, Column 193 of Ted Kooser's American Life in Poetry. Read entire poem. NPR’s Morning Edition: Environmentalists encourage people to cut down holiday trees instead of buying artificial ones. Why live trees are better than plastic one. Listen to the story. Do you know what sex your pinecones are? Yep, gender is everything. This is a fun article on how to tell male from female trees, how to gather the pinecones, and how to harvest the pine "seeds" for planting. Check it out.

Honor Your Creativity with a Creative Altar

2010-12-05T12:29:00.010-07:00

Coors Baseball Stadium, Denver, Colorado

We create ceremony and ritual around all other parts of our lives—baptism, bar mitzvah, feast days, confirmation, graduation, death, we even create ceremony around sports (think of Monday Night Football or the all-American baseball game), yet our culture does not have very many examples of rituals which honor the creative part of our nature. Let me clarify, not rituals (like last night's Kennedy Center Honors) that recognize the artists of our culture, but rituals that honor the process of creating art--the act itself--rituals that set the stage for us, that prepare us as we begin our work.

Rituals and ceremonies around our writing and art and song create safe atmospheres for our creative spirits, much like churches, or mountain tops, or secluded paths in the woods, create sanctuaries for our faith. The spirit knows when we enter a temple or a kiva or a sweat lodge or a mosque that these are safe places for the prayerful spirit.

Door in Santa Fe, New Mexico

Our creative spirits need an atmosphere that tells us that it is safe to come out, to think without boundaries, to let the heart lead the dialogue our inner-selves want to have with the outer world. Creative altars carve an opening into the inner-self, that dark mysterious place where creativity happens. Much like a door welcomes us into a new place, the altar can be a portal into the imagination. In the quiet spaces of my mind a thought lies still, writes poet Tom Barritt in his poem "What's In A Temple," ....it begs me to open the door, so it can walk about.

Start a ritual around your creative practice—a special candle you only burn when writing, a special tea you only drink when penning poems, special music you only listen to when sculpting, special fetishes or mementos that are kept safely stored away until the paints come out, a special tapestry that drapes your writing table.

Sandstone in Cathedral Wash

Our bodies love ritual, and our cells respond accordingly, awakening our inner-selves and telling us the time has finally come to dive deeply into the nether world where our creative selves dwell. What can sometimes seem devoid of inspiration is actually an open container, waiting to be filled by our innermost thoughts.

Suggestion: Start creating your altar by selecting a stone that has special meaning, perhaps one that has called out to you during a hike. Think of the ancient life energy still moving within that stone and have faith in the quiet movement of your own creative energy.

Flying High with Hemispheres Magazine

2010-11-30T12:00:00.002-07:00

November 2010 issue

EN ROUTE TO ORLANDO, FLORIDA, I spent the first 20 airborne minutes browsing the November issue of United’s inflight magazine, Hemispheres, which boasts over 7 million readers worldwide. Here’s a sampling of the pieces that caught my attention, with an eye, of course, toward nature and writing themes:

DISPATCH: Notes from All Over--a good place to submit very short, human interest tidbits. This month’s story, "Country Seats: Growing Couch Potatoes," written by Joey Rubin, came from Isleworth, England where the average British family spends an appalling 43 hours a week slouched indoors on sofas. A charity dedicated to preserving historic houses and gardens decided to literally ‘take the couch outside." Using hay bales and grass turf, they erected giant grass living room sets in 11 different garden locations in the British Isles. Guess that's what we've become: outdoor couch potatoes. Reading this dispatch made me itch to get off my derriere, which wasn't easy to do flying couch--I mean coach. Check out the story and illustration of grass-grown recliner.

Rift Valley, Kenya from Leakey Collection

HERO—short inspiring anecdotal pieces featuring heroic people. "In the Tall Grass," this month’s story, features heroes Philip Leakey (son of famed paleoanthropologist Louis and Mary Leakey) and his wife, Katy Leakey. When a disastrous drought hit Kenya, devastating the cattle-based economy and lifestyle of the Maasai people, the Leakeys (with deep roots in Kenya) began teaching the Maasai women the art of making jewelry from grass and fallen acacia wood. Go to http://www.leakeycollection.com/ to buy online and help the Maasai women feed and educate their children. Thank you to Sharon McDonnell for this submission to Hemispheres. Look around for the heroes in your life, and send a query.

THE BIG TEN: What to Watch, Read, and Listen to this Month: #6 of the big 10 features Dennis Lehane’s new novel Moonlight Mile, sequel to Gone, Baby, Gone. This one caught my eye because I heard Lehane speak in Denver about a month ago, and he was great. “A character in a novel,” he said, “should always have a question that he or she is wrestling with. The trick," according to Lehane, " is that the character knows what that question is, but the reader doesn’t." Click HERE to go his website, and view video with Dennis talking a bit about himself and Moonlight Mile.

The November issue of Hemispheres also features the full-length article "The Long Walk" by Grant Stoddard--an interesting piece on Karl Bushby, a former British paratrooper who decided, when he was in his late 20s, to walk home to England from the tip of southern Chile--a 36,000 mile journey. Read about this astounding journey.

A NOTE ON SUBMISSIONS: If you contact Hemispheres regarding a submission, they’ll want to know if you’re a PR professional, or a freelance writer. No guidelines were available online, other than what I found at Freelance Writing.com.

Spinning like Rumi: Confessions from a Writing Coach about an Unsettled Life

2010-10-21T13:26:00.005-06:00

When our bodies and minds are in motion, writing can be difficult.

And I've been in motion the entire spring, summer, and fall -- to galleries and tea houses in Santa Fe, to the Heard Museum and Gila River in Phoenix, to conference centers and family gatherings in Oklahoma, to the piers and missions and merry-go-rounds of Santa Barbara where I celebrated my sister's 60th birthday, to the mountains of Wyoming and the high sagebrush country of Nevada, to the forests and grasslands of South Dakota's Black Hills.

Then to the canyons of Utah, then to the dust bowl panhandle of Oklahoma, then flying over the river I'd just floated to land among the palm trees of San Diego.

When this fall arrived, I was exhausted and yearned to sink my energy back into the roots of home.

But it was not the traveling that exhausted me. It was not having time to absorb and ingest the experiences, as if I were a vessel filled with swirling sensations that had never had time to settle to the bottom of the glass. I had written barely a word in months of traveling and teaching.

The famous 13^th century Sufi poet Rumi, whose son founded the Order of the Whirling Dervishes, wrote thousands of poems. Many of them he created while dancing. A scribe followed on his spinning heels and transcribed them onto parchment.

Imagine! A personal scribe to follow us wherever we go, writing down our every uttered thought, capturing our epiphanies the moment they occur like nets flung over a flutter of butterflies whose wings have just unfurled.

What luxury! To commit our body and mind to each experience with such devotion of the senses that we stay entirely engaged in the moment without feeling the need to stop, interpret, or filter the experience through the sieve of intellect. To stay totally conscious to the experience!

But how then do we capture the experience for posterity's sake? How do we journal after the experience and still capture the immediacy of the moment, rather than a reflection on the moment? How can we make our writing as adventurous and immediate as our travels?

"Adventure is what you see out there in the landscape," says Craig Childs, an author who is always on the move. "It's you, out there in the world." He also says, "I'm not really a purpose-driven traveler. I just want to get into the middle of it."

This Oklahoma college saddle bronc rider was in and out of the middle of "it" so quickly, he hardly had time to remember being in the saddle. But I'll bet he relived every moment of it when he rinsed the arena dirt from his mouth, and for the next 48 hours as his aching bones and sore muscles recalled the experience at a cellular level.

Writing is an odd duck. It is conceived through experience yet born of contemplation. It is often about something that has already happened, yet written with the intent to fool the reader into believing that it is happening right now. Good writing is moving what our cells know onto the page so the readers can know it too.

The few notes I did jot down these last few months are scattered about in three different journals, and in various files on my computer. They are as disorganized as the flurry of memories that have yet to settle down in the rampant waters of my mind.

"We are literally carrying stories within us," author and professor John Calderazzo tells his writing students at Colorado State University. And of course, we are. Like the land carries the rivers.

The Gila River (pictured) used to naturally flow through the area that is now Phoenix and was, in some places, 5-6 miles wide. It was the lifeblood of the Pima and Maricopa tribes. In the late 1800s it was damned, causing devastating starvation. But the stories of the people did not die, and 118 years later the Gila River Indian Community won back their rights to the river and the ecosystem of the river is once again thriving.

If I'm lucky, when I settle down and start browsing through my notes, I'll rediscover the flow of energy that can turn my travels into stories. It is this flow, this forward movement of energy, that I must recreate if my memories are to become more than nostalgia. And it will be through the senses that I bring these memories to life -- through remembering each scent and sight, each touch and taste and sound -- like merry-go-round music with notes that rise and fall in unison with the prancing horses and bubbling laughter of a sister who has ridden beside me all my life.

The Brain "on" Nature: out of reach on the river, then back in the rim world

2010-09-26T16:56:00.004-06:00

It was tempting to stay--to keep our rafts pointed downstream and our oars in the water--at peace with each other and with life on the river. How simple to spend one's days floating, contemplating water dappled by sunlight, molding palmfuls of river clay with our fingers, writing unhurried thoughts into the pages of our journals, sharing morning coffee and evening stars. How simple, this temporary life on the river.

The red cliffs and black rocks of Westwater Canyon on the Colorado River are surprisingly accommodating. Nooks and crannies provide cool hiding places. Wind and water carve curvaceous armchairs into shiny black schist boulders. Sandstone crumbles and forms river beaches soft enough to sink one's toes into, or to sculpt one's face upon. These are simple joys. One discovers that comfort is a relative term, much easier to find on the river than expected.

A month ago, The New York Times published an article by Matt Richtel about five neuroscientists who spent a week rafting the San Juan River in southern Utah. They were "Outdoors and Out of Reach, Studying the Brain," doing a field study on the river to better understand how heavy use of digital devices affect how we think and behave.

During our pre-trip dinner the night before my women-only trip launched, I talked with the women about the sense of relaxation that seems to flood the body by the second day. "I think it's because, when we're sheltered by the canyon walls and the electromagnetic waves that bombard us every moment on the 'rim world' can't reach us, our bodies can let down their defensive shields. And when we let down our defenses, we remember, at a cellular level, that we are made of the same stuff from which the cliffs are made--the same rhythms that move the river, move us."

I haven't researched the science behind this theory, and the theory differs from the one the neuroscientists were out to either prove or disprove--that the constant use of digital devices are psychologically unhealthy--but my instincts tell me that when the electromagnetic spectrum reaches a certain intensity, the human body recoils from it. On the last day of our five-day river trip, I told the women, "You might find that you're dizzy when you get off the river--like the world is spinning, or you've got vertigo, or your senses are being bombarded. Re-entry can be difficult, so be gentle to your body. Seek quiet places. Seek natural lighting. Surround yourself with the sounds of birds and the rustling of leaves."

It's easy to forget that we, too, are organic--made of all natural ingredients, that our brains do best when fed a diet more akin to the sounds of a forest, than the sounds of a 60-second sound-bite. Sand sculpture by Roxanne Swentzell, featured guest artist from the Santa Clara Pueblo. To view more of Roxanne's art, go to www.roxanneswentzell.net.

The 2010 5-day River Writing and Sculpting Journey for Women took place in Westwater Canyon, Utah. Contact Page to have your name added to her mailing list in order to receive news releases on the 2011 river trip.

Orion Magazine Brings Back The Place Where You Live

2010-08-04T13:08:00.002-06:00

WHEN Orion Magazine announced recently that they were bringing back their popular department, "THE PLACE WHERE YOU LIVE," I thought of a zillion things I wanted to share about the landscape I call home, and the people with whom I share it. I also thought of the ranch in Wyoming, which my grown children still call home. A large part of my heart still lives there - will always live there. But there is also a part of me that is even more deeply rooted to this place, to Mt. Vernon. Read this essay online at Orion.

IN THEIR CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS, the Orion editors describe the department as a space for us to exercise our sixth sense. "Tell us about your place," they invited. "What history does it hold for you? What are your hopes and fears for it? What do you do to protect it, or prepare it for the future, or make it better?"

AH, MAKING IT BETTER. That credo has guided the small mountain community where I live for 100 years. Our homes, nestled in a mixed ponderosa pine forest, started as summer cabins. Narrow dirt roads wind in and out of the trees, and wildlife corridors still meander between the houses. Instead of a hundred homes sitting on 10-acre plots, leaving no open space, our homes are clustered on 200 acres, leaving nearly a 1000 acres of land as communal, natural habitat. From my neighbors’ decks, you can look east over Denver to the Great Plains, or west to the peaks of the Continental Divide. Or sometimes, as close as the wildlife in your own backyard.

WE LIVE IN PEACEFUL PROXIMITY with elk, mule deer, bobcat, fox, coyotes, wild turkeys, golden and bald eagles, hawks, bighorn sheep, mountain lion, bear, and even the rare tassel-eared Abert’s squirrel. We don’t have manicured hedges or mowed lawns in Mt. Vernon, nor city water. A carefully monitored, gravity fed groundwater system serves the needs of our residents, the club house, swimming pool, tennis courts, community garden and horse pasture, and fire suppression hydrant system,

Dick and Judy moved here fifty years ago. “The people have always taken responsibility for creating and maintaining the hiking trails,” says Dick. “A short walk from your home, and you are in open space.

"THIS WAS A FREE AND SAFE ENVIRONMENT FOR CHILDREN,” recalls Judy, “and it still is. I love seeing the young people who were raised here moving back in and raising their own children. When you live in a community like this, you understand that with freedom comes responsibility. It’s the volunteers who take care of the land.”

MT. VERNON'S VOLUNTEER COMMITTEES include Community Activities, History, Long Range Planning, Mediation, Open Space, Renewable Energy, Roads, Weeds, and Stewardship. A long-standing preservation partner of the Clear Creek Land Conservancy, we have also helped preserve over 10,000 adjacent acres.

Beloved Mt. Vernon icon and senior Olympian Gudy Gaskill, founder of the 500-mile Colorado Trail system, can still be seen teaching neighborhood children to cross-country ski, or pulling her grandkids up the sledding hill by the picnic grounds.

LIKE ASPENS, THE ROOTS Mt. Vernon residents are interconnected. And when we squabble, like any family does, we’re gracious enough to forgive each other's shortcomings. We are, after all, in it for the long haul. We each, in our own way, protect this place that we love, envisioning its future, knowing it is as intrinsically linked to our children's future, as it is linked to our past.

READ THIS STORY ONLINE AT ORION.

CLICK HERE TO SUBMIT YOUR OWN STORY TO ORION'S "THE PLACE WHERE YOU LIVE.

The Liquid Spirit of Water

2010-07-21T15:05:00.002-06:00

THE LIFE FORCE that moves through us, and through every drop of water and layer of slick rock, is as familiar as our own breath, yet as hard to grasp as the wind that rustles the cottonwoods. We are told that the elements of science are kin to the elements of human nature: that those with Fire in their souls possess a radiant energy, an enthusiasm that brings color and vibrancy into the world; that those with Earth in their souls are well grounded and have enduring and nurturing qualities; that the currents of thought and spirit flow most freely through those with Airy dispositions.

YET MODERN SCIENTISTS of ancient astrology believe that our deepest emotions – our most fervent passions – are expressed best by those with the liquid spirit of Water, the formless potential out of which all creation flows.

Waterfalls overwhelm us with the power of their sensual – and yes – female natures.

SPRING AFTER SPRING, they seem to hurl themselves over the edges of their own fast-flowing desires. They rush wantonly toward the prairies, carving canyons into stone, reminding us of our own restless natures. We feel their power especially during the melt of winter snow, when they rush full-boar over cliffs, tumbling over boulders made slick by their urgent passage.

IN SUMMER, they dress themselves in sheer liquid gowns, revealing silver hearts, mossy tendrils grown long in the clear pools gathered at their feet. Wildlife drink from their ponds, nest in the boughs of the trees that flank their beds. Yet, come fall, they seem to pause, waiting for the coming winter in the clefts where the cliffs meet, teasing him with their lazy autumn meanders and slow seeping springs. If we’re lucky, fall lasts long past the dying back of dogwood, long past the gold guilding of verdant fern.

SOMETIMES WINTER COMES SOFTLY to the waterfalls, like a shy suitor – his knocking can be heard in the creak of willow branch, or in the cry of kestrel leaving, or seen in the gentle dusting of snow on fur tree. The waterfalls seemed wrapped in winter’s icy blue arms, as if spreading their feathery water wings, dreaming of flight. Hungry deer come to feed on the lichen that clings to nearby stone and bark. Chickadees find shelter in the branches of the pines that grow on the stone slopes beside their chilled waters. Crystallized droplets hang suspended like diamonds.

SOMETIMES, IN THE DARK OF A BLUE MOON, winter’s coming is not so subtle. He storms over mountain and prairie, staying long past the kestrel’s leaving. He kisses the wetness from the waterfalls with frosted whiskers, slowing their passage over rock and stone, turning their bodies into sheaths of ice. His snows bring their deeper natures to the surface, the bitter-cold bite of his breath forcing them to look inward at their own ever-changing ways.

WATERFALLS IN WINTER have the power to slow the passage of our own busy and hectic lives. Now is when we can reach out and touch their mysterious natures, feel life manifested within their frozen spirits. We breathe deeply, let winter fill our lungs, feel awed by the raw power held in timeless abeyance, like pure energy sculpted in marbled ice.

IF WE WAIT FOR THE TURNING OF THE EARTH, the heat of the sun, wait until the air in our lungs no longer chills our bones, we can once again hear our own familiar breathing. We can watch the sheaths of ice melt, watch rivers come to life as streams and creeks fill with mountain flow. Life will once again rush past us in a watery frenzy. And once again, we’ll find ourselves longing to reach out and grasp the illusive beauty.

Note: Red Room's topic of the week is Fire, Air, Earth or Water.

Shining a Light on Ted Kooser, American Life in Poetry, and Two Women Poets from Wyoming

2010-07-07T15:49:00.020-06:00

I’ve been spending the day with two poems—both written by western women (both over 40, by the way), both published, both about a man and a woman—but both paint very different portraits of the relationship between a husband and wife. The first poem, “Denial” by Pat Frolander, just appeared on TED KOOSER'S COLUMN American Life in Poetry and is included in Pat's chapbook Grassland Genealogy (Finishing Line Press, Kentucky, 2009). These poems are, to quote past Wyoming poet laureate Robert Roripaugh, filled with the "subtle strands of heart and mind that tie humans and animals to each other and the grasslands they share." Please click HERE to read Pat's poem. Ted Kooser, a Pulitzer prize-winning poet and one of our nation’s esteemed poet laureates, is from the Great Plains, the heartland of America. He is widely praised for his "plainspoken style, his gift for metaphor, and his quiet discoveries of beauty in ordinary things.” To listen to an NPR interview with Ted, click HERE.

Ted's book The Poetry Home Repair Manual (University of Nebraska Press) is one of my favorites, especially the section "At a window on the world" (pg. 31), where he talks about the presence of the poet in a poem. It applies to memoir writing as well. "While choosing your words it is as if you were at a window looking out into the world," writes Kooser.

"The poem is the record of a moment at that window, but for once the author – not time nor weather – gets to control the amount of light outside. For once, you are in charge of the sun. If you want to write a poem about yourself, you turn down the light on the world and thus brighten your reflection in the glass. If you don’t want to appear very prominently in your poem, you brighten the light on the world until your reflection all but disappears. But there is always this double image, made up of the poet’s reflection in the glass – perhaps vivid, perhaps faint, perhaps somewhere in between...." This silhouette photo, which illustrates Ted's "window on the world" so well, is by photographer, producer and friend Kathleen Jo Ryan (copyright 1989). The photo appears in her book Ranching Traditions and was taken at dawn at the Sombrero Ranch in Colorado. Kathleen deserves an entire article just on her, so check back in. Meantime, click HERE to learn about her fascinating documentary project, Right to Risk. In Pat Frolander's poem "Denial" the light shines most brightly, though sadly, on the ranch wife. And Pat's presence, as the narrator, is barely felt at all (see the 2nd to last line).

The second poem that has captured my attention today I first read in Teresa Jordan's anthology Graining the Mare.  In "Timothy Draw" by SUE WALLIS, the light shines brightly and intimately on the narrator of the poem. Sue was gracious enough to let me share it here. The photo, (copyright Kathleen Jo Ryan 1989) is of ranch woman and cow boss, Kim Smith, of the Cottonwood Ranch in Nevada, and also appears in Ranching Traditions. I just had the pleasure of spending a few days with Kim at the ranch. She shines a bright light on the world too. Here's Sue's poem, "Timothy Draw."

We pause at the top of Timothy Draw
Look down the country for stray cows
He cocks his head
Stands in the stirrups
Hands on the horn
Relaxed and easy and graceful
He moves with a horse
Like few men can

In one brief, quick space
I love him more
Than I will ever love again

Like passion, but not of sex
Like Life without death
Like the nudge and the tug and the sleepy smile
Of a too-full child at your still-full breast
Something that explodes from your toes
But flows through your bones
Like warm honey

More powerful than violence
         I lift my reins
          Our horses sidestep
          ... and we slip on down the draw

Two men. Two women. Both husbands and wives. Both living their lives on land they love. Yet such differerent experiences. Both poets capture the human experience. One, by standing at a distance. The other, by entering the intimate terrain of the poem. Both have much to teach us about life.

Sue and her husband raise grassfed beef on their Wyoming ranch. Click HERE to find out more.

WRITERS OVER 40 ROCK!

2010-06-22T15:49:00.001-06:00

According to The New Yorker's Summer Fiction issue, the odds of anyone writing anything of substance after they turn 40 are not good. That's disheartening, since I haven't seen 40 for more than a decade and in 2 days I'll be one year closer to 60. Sam Tanenhaus, editor of the The New York Time's Sunday Book Review, expands on that theory in his essay "How Old Can a Young Writer Be?" According to Tanenhaus, Herman Melville was 32 when he wrote Moby Dick. But Virginia Woolf didn't enter her prime until she was in her 40s. Pearl S. Buck was only 39 when she wrote The Good Earth, but she was 46 when she wrote Peony, the same year that she received the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Should those of us in our 50s, 60s, 70s, and beyond, content ourselves with literary obscurity? Who are your favorite "over 40" authors? What substantive piece are you working on? ANSWER THE POLL and help me compile an IMPRESSIVE list to fuel our over-40 ambitions!

Ambition. It's the one thing the writers featured in The New Yorker's Summer Fiction issue seemed to have in common, which I find ironic because I've been trying to learn these last few years to be less ambitious, less driven, to be less about striving and more about thriving. So this summer's newsletter is dedicated to things that help us thrive. Not the least of which is one another. Wishing you a brilliant summer solstice season!

CLAIMING GROUND WITH A SNORT AND A BUCK AND A GOOD BOOK

2010-06-15T13:35:00.003-06:00

THE WYOMING GLOW I brought home with me after this year’s Literature & Landscape of the Horse Retreat at the Vee Bar Ranch lasted for days. I literally beamed. Not surprising after a week immersed in some of the things I love the most—horses, stories about horses, other writers and artists, and the wide-open western landscape.

“I missed you all so much the minute I got on the plane, it nearly broke my heart,” wrote Cat, a guest from Massachusetts. “I'll never forget my week at the ranch, and your kind heart that made it possible for all of us to know each other.” Cat fell in love with landscape, the people, the horses, and most importantly, back in love with life.

Life HAPPENS on a ranch—life, and birth, and death, and renewal. The warmth and generosity of families like Kari and Brent Kilmer (co-owners and managers of the Vee Bar) does not happen by mistake. It rises up from life on the land as organically as do the wild spring irises. Kari’s grandpa ranches only a few miles up the road, at the base of the Snowy Range Mountains. This landscape is Kari’s homeland, the place where she was born and reared. Her husband Brent was raised in Wyoming, too—on a ranch near Lusk. His family has been living on that same piece of ground for over a hundred years.

Laura Bell’s new book, CLAIMING GROUND, (which I haven’t yet read) is intriguing for all the same reasons. “Her story is a heart-wrenching ode to the rough, enormous beauty of the western landscape,” writes the publisher, Random House/Knopf, “and to the peculiar sweetness of hard labor, to finding oneself even in isolation, to a life formed by nature, and to the redemption of love, whether given or received.”

I’m not just drawn to Laura’s story because she herded sheep in Wyoming's Big Horn Basin, or because she was, for a time, a cattle rancher, forest ranger, outfitter, and masseuse. But because she yearned to create a home and to find solid earth in which to put down her familial roots.

In the opening few pages of my memoir IN SEARCH OF KINSHIP, I write, “These stories are linked to the land—stories of our children, of aborted foals and orphaned calves, of summer fawns in the meadow, and of their fathers, the bucks, in the fall.”

How can we NOT yearn for a deeper connection with the things we love? How can we NOT fall back in love with life when we slow down long enough to actually live it, moment by moment? Watch the horses. They show us how. They lift their heads and flare their nostrils at the morning breeze. They pivot their ears at the sound of our voices. They lower their necks at the pleasing strokes of our curry brushes. They let us ride on their backs and carry us on the wind. And then, when day is done, they reclaim their wild roots, kick up their heels and gallop across the tundra and into the sunset.

Yes, it’s true. It’s not just a cliché. It’s why we love them. Because they remind us that life is meant to be lived. With gusto. With a snort and a buck. With heads high and few regrets.

Scroll up to watch the 2010 Literature & Landscape of the Horse slideshow. Hats off to Alice Liles and Jenny Wehinger for providing some of the slideshow photos. To read Alice's blog about the retreat, please go to The Bright Lights of Muleshoe.

COPPER NICKEL AND BLACK DIAMOND: It's not too late to enter Copper Nickel's Literary Contest!

2010-05-21T10:50:00.003-06:00

OKAY, so the connection is a stretch. But when COPPER NICKEL (the journal of art and literature published by the University of Colorado Denver) announced their first fiction and poetry CONTEST, I had to check it out. The term copper nickel was originally applied to the Indian Head cent coin. From 1913-1938, U.S. mints began producing the Indian Head nickel. The front side of the coin features the profile of an iconic Native American man, said to be a compilation of features from 4 prominent Native American men: Iron Tail, an Oglala Sioux chief; Two Moons, a Cheyenne chief; Big Tree, a Kiowa chief; and possibly John Big Tree, a member of the Seneca Nation.
The model for the bison on the back side of the coin is believed to have been BLACK DIAMOND, a bull from NY's Central Park Zoo. He lived a long life but died a rather humbling death.

Now, let's talk about the literary Copper Nickel. This impressive journal isn't just a publication for student writing. It also features the poetry and prose of professional authors, like Pattiann Rogers and Lee Ann Roripaugh, or Alyson Hagy and Mary Clearman Blew. "Weaving the Web," a short fiction piece of mine written while I was sequestered for a month in a mountain cabin, appears in Copper Nickel 10. If you'd like a PDF of the story, send me a note.

Here's the low-down on the competition: DEADLINE EXTENDED TO MAY 31! Ten days away! It's a two-part competition: poetry, and fiction. Fiction submissions will be judged by RON CARLSON, author of one of my favorite writing books, Ron Carlson Writes A Story, published by Greywolf Press. The winner will receive $1000 and publication in Copper Nickel 15 in Spring 2011.

The poetry contest will be judged by NATASHA TRETHEWAY, Pulitzer-Prize Winning author of Native Guard. Her first poetry collection, Domestic Work was also published by Graywolf Press.

So don't wait. Check out Copper Nickel's first literary competition now. SUBMIT YOUR WORK. When you do, think about what inspired your story or your poem and take a moment to honor the history of your words.

And the next time you see an old Indian Nickel with a bison on the back, think of Black Diamond and the four nations that Iron Tail, and Two Moons, and Big Tree, and John Big Tree represent. Unlike Black Diamond, these nations, and OVER 500 OTHERS, are still alive and well.

8000 Writers Descend on Denver - AWP, Second Installment

2010-04-20T13:37:00.001-06:00

Please scroll down to April 15 to read the first "8000 Writers Descend on Denver" installment about the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) conference in Denver last weekend.

"What is to give light, must endure burning." This is the motto that has, for 36 years, fed the brave editorial direction of The Sun magazine. I wasn't able to attend the INTO THE FIRE reading by Sun authors Sy Safransky, Ellen Bass, and 5 other notibles, but I heard it was fabulous.

Instead, I attended WHEN FORM INVENTS FUNCTION: THE CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN INDIAN PROSE POEM, in part because Sherman Alexie was supposed to be on the panel (a stand-up comedian who brilliantly disguises himself as an author, so brilliantly in fact that War Dances just won the 2010 Pen/Faulkner Award for Fiction), but in greater part because my frend, Choctaw author LeAnne Howe was on the panel. If you want to know who invented baseball, read LeAnne's novel Miko Kings, and check out her Miko King blog.

Part of the panel discussion revolved around genre, a hotly debated topic for more than 10 years in LeAnne's academic circle at the University of Illinois, where she is a professor of English and American Indian Studies. "Hey, we're Indian," LeAnne told the audience (in her charming, radically intelligent way), "we don't need no stinking genre." She went on to say, "Let the work teach you about the process...let the work find its own genre."

Her advice makes sense. Find the fire, let it burn (fuel the writing with passion), then let the writing inform the genre. Most of the time, we do just the opposite. We sit down and say, "I'm going to write a poem." Then, even though the writing might unfold as something different, we try over and over again to fit it into the genre in which we thought we were going to write. "Sometimes," said LeAnne, "we discover what a piece of writing is by discovering what it's not."

Several panels explored the western landscape as both character and genre: Western Myth Busters, Women Writing the West, To West or Not to West, The First Next Place: Montana Writers Take on Regionalism, and The Transplanted Writer (mentioned in my first AWP installment). The idea of remythologizing the West has been a favorite (and tiring) topic at conferences in the West for decades. I found myself writing in my notebook I LOVE THE WEST out of shear self-defense because many of panels did a good job of exhausting the topic.

Do women write the West differently? This question was posed several times. Are women more apt to allow myths, our own and others, to live side by side without feeling the need to prove either one true or false? What are your thoughts? Perhaps the "woman's" West is a more diverse landscape.

During the conference, a moving tribute was paid to Standing Rock Sioux author VINE DELORIA, JR, Controversial author of twenty books about the Native American experience, he wrote in an op-ed article in The New York Times in 1976, "We have brought the white man a long way in 500 years. From a childish search for mythical cities of gold and fountains of youth to the simple recognition that lands are essential for human existence." Mitakuye Oyasin. The Universe is alive, and we are all related. Much of the career of this esteemed scholar was devoted to diversifying our beliefs about the West.

On the final night of the conference, Terry Tempest Williams (photo credit Ted C. Brummond), author of 15 books including the beloved memoir Refuge, joined Rick Bass, author of 20 books including the memoir Why I Came West, for a final keynote presentation. When I said hello to Terry earlier that day, she shared with me that she had had mysterious health concerns and that the doctors had discovered a small vasculer mass in the language part of her brain. She opted not to have surgery, so the mass was still there. Each day seemed suddenly a rare gift, not to be squandered.

A few hours later, during the final event with Rick Bass, Terry told the audience of hundreds that she was going to read something very raw, something that required courage. "I shared a draft with Rick last night," she said, "and he cared enough to be critical. To preserve my dignity, I won't repeat what he said." The audience laughed, then quieted as she began to speak of the vascular mass, of the visions that came, of the birds that appeared, and reappeared, bringing both beauty and a sense of otherworldliness.

When Rick took the stage after Terry, he quickly shared with the audience that the sponsors of the event (University of North Carolina Wilmington) had wined and dined him to excess, plying him him with coffee to sober him up before he spoke. I'm glad the coffee didn't work - he was charming in this slightly inebriated state.

Perhaps Denver's Mile Hi thin air was partly to blame. The air here is intoxicating, even when you're born and reared along the Front Range and grow up in the shadows of Colorado's rocky, white-capped peaks. The conference, too, was intoxicating - almost too much of a good thing. But taken one panel at a time, one speaker at a time, one idea at a time, well worth the satiated feeling that followed.

Apply to present at the 2011 AWP Conference in Washington, D.C.

OVER 8000 WRITERS DESCEND ON DENVER FOR AWP - First Installment

2010-04-15T11:46:00.008-06:00

The program booklet for AWP’s annual conference and bookfair was 322 pages thick – no kidding. The Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) has been “fostering literary talent and achievement” since 1967, but this is the first year they’ve done so in the West.
What happens at AWP? Keynotes. Dozens of featured readings. Dozens of panels. And at least half a dozen off-site parties every night. It’s a virtual who's who of the literary world, with special emphasis on MFA students, programs, and instructors. If you’re a serious writer, this is the place to be. I say that a bit tongue-in-cheek, because I know there are a lot of serious writers in the West who have perhaps never heard of AWP.

Here’s what I loved about the conference (besides the famous Blue Bear sculpture outside Denver's Convention Center peering in at all of us)….

Lots of friends from the West’s writing community were there. Teresa Jordan. Laura Pritchett. LeAnne Howe. Kent Myers. Laurie Wagner Buyer. Julene Bair. Lisa Jones. David Romtvedt. Chris Ransick. Maria Martinez. Deirdre McNamer, Lee Ann Roripaugh. So many more! And Denver’s own Lighthouse Writers was a prominent sponsor.

Presenting on a panel with William Kittredge for the forthcoming anthology In the Manner of Country: Living and Writing the American West (title taken from a quote by Mary Austin in Land of Little Rain) was an honor. As was meeting the anthology’s editors Lynn Stegner and Russell Rowland after months of email communications. Kittredge's comments on Western mythology reminded me that I need to re-read his classic memoir, Hole in the Sky, and read for the first time The Best Short Stories of William Kittredge (Greywolf Press).

Robert Wilder and Pam Houston (with Summer Wood and Uma Krishnaswami) had the audience laughing out loud during the panel, “Writing the West: The Transplanted Writer as Literary Outsider.” Pam and I have presented together a couple of times and it was good to be again in the presence of her wit. Rob (author of Daddy Needs a Drink) is a writer with that rare gift of both humor and wisdom. Here are a few of their more serious comments (not verbatim):

“Any work of art needs an insider, and an outsider,” said Rob. “What the insider knows intuitively is a difficult way to create art. I feel lucky because I don’t take the West for granted.”

“I love the West exactly the way someone from New Jersey loves the West,” said Pam. “What happened to me in the western landscape? The Colorado Plateau was big enough that it made me feel like IT knew more than I did. My first job was JUST TO TRY TO GET IT DOWN.”

She didn't mean Get down the feelings. She meant GET DOWN THE PLACE and let the details of the landscape lead you organically to the story. "If I can get down those physical chunks of stuff, the story happens."

Ron Carlson (who spoke at the "Tribute to William Kittredge" event along with Terry Tempest Williams and Rick Bass) gives similar advice in his book Ron Carlson Writes a Story. "Solve your problems through the physical world," he advises writers. Terry gave me similar advice over fifteen years ago at a workshop in Wyoming. She challenged all of us to know the names of at least 10 plants, 10 trees, and 10 creatures that share our landscape.

During the "Writing the West" panel, Summer Wood (winner of the $50,000 AROHO Gift of Freedom Award) gave this advice: "Understand how STORY SITS IN LANDSCAPE."

In my essay, "A Shape-Shifting Land" (included in the forthcoming anthology In the Manner of the Country), I write: "Writing personal stories about the landscapes we love is a radical act. A protective act. A celebratory act. Even an act of desperation. It is also an intimate and sensual act. Sometimes I crave the western earth like food, or breath, or sex, or water."

What do you crave in your writing? How do your stories sit in landscape?

More AWP inspiration to follow, so stay-tuned.

JENTEL: A RESIDENCY PROGRAM FOR WRITERS AND ARTISTS

2010-03-21T15:22:00.005-06:00

The Spring Equinox is a time of earthly balance, when day and night are everywhere the same—a good time to envision the rest of the year with clarity and focus. My creative life is out of balance right now—I know this. Whenever I’m not spending enough time engaged in the creative process of writing my brain gets cob-webby and I get cranky. Half-formed thoughts congeal and cloud my vision.

Writing requires introspection. Yet the business of writing requires extroversion, reaching out to the world at large. When I expend too much energy with the business of writing, and not enough time with the creative act of writing stories, I find myself longing to be back at Jentel, where nothing mattered but the writing.

In 2003, I was awarded a month-long residency at Jentel. The award included a $400 stipend, a private writing studio, a private bedroom, and a fabulous community kitchen and living area that I shared with the other five residents: another writer, and four visual artists.

On our first evening together, I wrote in my journal, “Every room of this luxurious house—every alcove, every tiled floor, every bit of eclectic artwork—glows with color. Reds. Blues. Greens. Yellows. Purples.” The vibrancy was intoxicating. I had come to Jentel during a mid-life juncture, “to color my life with possibility.” It turned out to be the perfect place.

Jentel sits at the base of Wyoming’s majestic Big Horn Mountains on the historic ranchland of Lower Piney Creek Valley. Renovated from old ranch buildings, seven separate buildings form the residency village. Sage and native grasses blanket the landscape. There are four private artist’s studios. The two separate writer’s studios, housed in a log cabin about 100 feet from the main house, come equipped with antique desks, bookshelves, recliners, ergonomic chairs, and reading lamps. Mine had a red enameled fireplace and a red stained glass window.

Wib Walling was painting landscapes, like this one he later named "Wyoming Ridge." Leslie was creating a hanging yellow wallpaper installation. Terry worked in charcoal and had us each pose for a portrait. Dehlia, the glass artist from Philadelphia who painted everything backwards, admitted that she feared the dark expanse of grassland that stretched beyond the borders of the village yard. They all assumed that because I was from Wyoming, the wide open spaces didn't frighten me.

Millicent Borges Accardi, a poet from California who had done residencies at Yaddo, Vermont Studio, Fundación Valparaiso in Mojacar, Spain, and Milkweed in Cesky Krumlov, would occasionally stand at our adjoining doors and read a few lines of her poetry. I would share a scene or two from the novel I was working on. Sometimes, we wandered over to the artists’ studios and peeked in on their work. The month we spent at Jentel was a centering time, a time to re-balance the priorities in our lives. For four weeks, we imersing ourselves in our own internal creative landscapes. The creative endeavors of those weeks are still coming to fruition. Millicent's first chapbook, Woman on a Shaky Bridge, was just published by Finishing Line Press.

Neltje, the founder and benefactor of Jentel, is the granddaughter of publisher Frank Nelson Doubleday. She is Jentel’s driving, visionary force. "An author has the ability to communicate a reflection of our present day society," writes Neltje, "and perhaps forecast a possible future if we could only listen...Old societies know the worth of art. We of the United States are young and foolish and not yet steeped in wisdom."

Apply for a residency at Jentel.

GUIDEBOOKS: Navigating Our Way Around the Pitfalls of Publishing and through Nature's Landscape

2010-03-03T17:17:00.005-07:00

Have you ever been hiking in the woods and come across canine scat and wondered coyote or dog? Or found deep imprints in the snow and wondered just how fresh are these mountain lion tracks?

No? Well then, have you ever been browsing the books at your favorite bookstore and wondered What made this publisher buy this book? What kind of query letter did this author write? Would this agent be interested in my manuscript

Guidebooks are indispensible whether we’re navigating our way through the jungles of publishing, or wondering about the creature that might be lurking in the bushes just a few feet ahead of us. If we want to get published, we have to study the business. If we want to write about the natural world, we have to pay homage to the experts by bowing to their years of field experience and reading their field guides.

A year ago, wildlife biologists spent days studying possible signs of gray wolves on the High Lonesome Ranch in northwestern Colorado (read “Prodigal Dogs” by Michelle Nijhuis, High Country News). Wildlife biologists are in the “business” of studying scat and tracks. They’re experts at it. It's their job. When I wrote In Search of Kinship, I rarely wrote a chapter without referring to the Audubon Society's book Grasslands. And while working on Sweetwater: A Mountain Cabin, a Life Unfolding, I referred again and again to Plants of the Black Hills and Bear Lodge Mountains.

When I spent a month alone in a remote cabin on the edge of the Cloud Peak Wilderness Area in Wyoming, the first books I packed to take along were my field guides. In addition to Grasslands, here are a few of them:

Animal Tracks (Peterson Field Guides) by Olaus J. Murie; Rocky Mountain Wild Flowers (National Museum of Natural Science) by A.E. Porsild; Field Guide to North American Rocks and Minerals (National Audubon Society);
How Indians Use Wild Plants for Food, Medicine and Crafts by Frances Densmore.

Agent Chip MacGregor’s January 17 newsletter praises Jeff Herman's GUIDE TO BOOK PUBLISHERS, EDITORS, AND LITERARY AGENTS 2010 (Sourcebooks). “This book can help you understand the industry,” he writes. “If you're interested in a career in writing, pick yourself up a copy.”

He also highly recommends Chuck Sambuchino's GUIDE TO LITERARY AGENTS (Writers Digest Books).

I just bought a copy of THE WRITERS GUIDE TO GETTING PUBLISHED by Kalmbach Publishing for $8.95, and the shipping was free. All three of these books have information on publishers, agents, editors, query letters, book proposals, and current market trends. And no doubt, they're just beginning to provide information for authors on how to negotiate our way through the tangled new landscape of e-books and iPads and Kindles. More on that in the next blog.

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TRIBAL HOSPITALITY AND INCREDIBLE JOURNEYS: Sometimes the most important journey we make, is the journey that takes us home.

2010-02-02T20:37:00.003-07:00

Last Thursday, Larry and Debby, neighbors in our small mountain community of less than 100 homes, sent out a plea to help them look for their lost dog. Molly, a beautiful Golden Retriever they had rescued when she was 6 months old, had apparently wandered away from home the day before. Snow had fallen that evening, blanketing the dirt roads, the yards, and the thick forest in white.

I set out that morning on a walk in search of Molly, as did several other neighbors. We saw Larry on the road. He’d been searching for hours—along the snow-covered hiking trails, near the picnic grounds, down to the meadow, among the wild grasses and groves of aspen that grow among the pines.

This neighborhood was my childhood home—my first introduction to real community. When I moved back a year and a half ago, I was greeted by neighbors who had known me for fifty years. Many, like me, had journeyed away, only to return home.

Mountain lions and coyotes also call this landscape home. The big cats prowl and hunt here. The coyotes den and raise their young on the same pastures on which our small community herd of horses graze.

Children gather wild onions and build tree houses; dogs greet each other on the road with wagging tails and occasional snarls. Neighbors quarrel and make up, sharing the community log splitter and July 4th picnic duties. Sewing clubs, and book clubs, thrive.

When the plea to help find Molly was sent out, it brought to mind one of my favorite stories. When I was 10 ½ years old, my father gave me a copy of Sheila Burnford’s classic novel The Incredible Journey. You probably know the story. Three beloved house pets--a doughty young Labrador retriever, a roguish old white bull terrier and an indomitable Siamese cat--travel 300 miles through the Canadian wilderness in search of their owners, facing starvation, exposure, and wild forest animals to "finally make their way home to the family they love.”

At one point in the journey, the three animals wander into a small community of Ojibway Indians gathered around their evening campfires. “The scent on the evening breeze was a fragrant compound of roasting rice, wild-duck stew and wood smoke.” Ravenous and exhausted, with the old white dog severely wounded, they stay for a few hours, long enough to eat the food kindly offered them, and to rest beside the warmth of the fires.

When the restless urge to find their way home strikes again, the threesome moved on. The small Ojibway community watched them as they “passed out of sight and into the blackness of the night.” The people believed that the “Spirits had sent the old white dog to them, hungry and wounded, to test their tribal hospitality.”

Two days after Molly was lost, Larry sent out a sad announcement. “We found Molly this morning. Apparently she passed away of a heart attack or stroke. She was in our front yard the whole time, the Wednesday evening snow covered her up…”

She had died in the palm of her home, in the heart of her community. Larry wrote that he had been “humbled by the emails and phone calls from neighbors offering sympathy and warm thoughts. “I realize now,” he said, “that to have this kind of support is what defines community. I can’t imagine living anywhere else.”

I don’t think the Spirits were testing our small community, but I am glad that our hospitality poured forth and that we kept the flames of hope burning for Larry and Debby. I’m glad that a mountain lion did not venture into their yard, and that coyotes did not tempt Molly from her home. I’m glad, too, that I found my way back here, where tribal values still warm the hearths of my neighbors' homes.

Deb O'Connor on Cosmic Shifts and Susan Bell's Bison

2010-01-24T17:48:00.004-07:00

Yesterday, at the National Western Stock Show in Denver, I watched artist Susan Bell paint two bison bulls. The sun was shining and the bulls seemed content to settle into the sawdust bedding and pose for her. She'd been painting animals for 3 days, sitting on a small stool, dipping her brush into the rich colors of her oil palate.

The scene was in stark contrast to gallery owners in Haiti who had survived the earthquake and were trying desperately to salvage their country's art, pulling prized pieces from the debris, compiling lists of the artists and writers who had not survived.

When tragedy strikes, like the Haitian earthquake, it's easy to think that the novel we’ve been writing for two years, or the sculpture we've been chipping away at for months, are frivolous endeavors. Shouldn’t we be doing something worthwhile? we ask ourselves. What is the point, after all, of art in light of such horrendous suffering?

Yet in today's LA Times, journalist Tracy Wilkinson, reporting from Port-au-Prince's main art museum, quoted Joseph Gaspard, a member of the board of directors of the College Saint Pierre museum, who said, struggling not to cry:

“Haitian art is what makes the international eye see us. Every Haitian is an artist. Art, it is us, it's what we are. Even our children are artists."

What will the children of Haiti paint now? What kinds of stories and poems will they write? Will they believe that the quake was the act of a vindictive God, or will they believe that shifting tectonic plates and fault lines were to blame? How do we reconcile the acts of heaven and earth? Is the Haitian earthquake just one more example of a huge cosmic shift? Do tsunamis and quakes on earth mirror a turbulent heaven?

"We are part of a magnificent weaving of Divine energy and all of this energy is undergoing a radical shift in awareness," wrote my friend artist and astrologer Deb O'Connor in her December newsletter. Deb used to edit Northern Lights, one of the finest nature-based publications in the country. I respect her work tremendously. (view crow painting).

"If I were to try to summarize the wild cosmic ride we're all taking together, I'd say that every single being--every human, every yellow warbler, every ponderosa pine, every drop of water in the Clark Fork/Columbia/Pacific, every stone and aquifer--is being completely re-configured at the level of consciousness."

"Imagine you are participating in great theatre," she wrote, "and that the planets are Players mirroring back to you cosmic secrets which will lead you through these Interesting Times.... "

"These players," she said, "are sending us extraordinary opportunities to facilitate the kinds of changes we've longed for all our lives. The key, of course, is to pay attention, to keep our minds and hearts wide open, and to be very very brave."

The children of Haiti will need brave stories. Stories of survival--perhaps even paintings of American bison, risen from the ashes of near extinction less than a century ago. They will need to be reminded, once again, that the world is a magical place where heaven and earth can come together. I like to think that where these two places meet is where we dwell when we create our art and our stories--in the land of the muses. I like to think that we are an integral part of the ongoing creation of the universe in which we live. (view Sue's bison and other wildlife paintings)

Read: In Haiti, some see the spirit world behind the quake.

View Deb O'Connor's Inner Sky Maps (commissioned birthchart paintings).

Attend Susan Bell's "Art for the Heart" opening reception February 11 in Denver.

Go to World Vision and Help a Child.

Check out Artists for Peace and Justice

Get on Deb O'Connor's mailing list

Celebrating the Elders

2009-12-23T14:10:00.005-07:00

What is an elder? That's the question a close friend asked me when I told her about the Elders Christmas Dinner hosted last week by the American Indian College Fund. "It's a blessing to help serve the meal," I said. "There were over 200 Indian elders there, from dozens of different tribes." My friend lowered her head shyly and asked, "What's an elder?" Her question made me ponder how we treat elders in the dominant culture of which I am a part. She knew, of course, what an elder was but not in the context of a special event held strictly to honor our elders.

The dinner was a special affair, but not a serious one (it's hard to be too serious with 200 adults eagerly awaiting the arrival of both dinner, and Santa). "If you're over 55," said emcee John Gritts, "please have a seat and a youngster (anyone under 55) will bring you your food."

The day after the Elders Dinner, Rick Williams, president of the American Indian College Fund, sent a thank you note to those who had helped. In the note, he shared something he had written several years ago about elders, and he gave me his permission to share it here:

"Tunkashila, Grandfather, Great Spirit. It is this way that we begin our prayers in Lakota. Tunkashila also means one's own grandfather. The reason that the words are used this way is because our Grandfathers are the Elders of the Tribe and in many ways personify the sacredness of the goodness and wisdom of the Great Spirit.

"Our Elders teach us who are ancestors were. Our Elders are our connection to everything in our past. It is with their knowledge that we understand how we fit into the World. Every Grandmother and Grandfather are sacred in many special ways. It is because of this that we will always 'Respect our Elders.' Hau, Mitaku Oyasin."

I'll bet a lot of you already have special traditions for your elders. Maybe, every holiday celebration, your family also serves the elders first? Maybe your children have been taught to wait until their grandparents are seated, before seating themselves? Maybe your children read holiday stories to their grandparents? If so, wonderful!

I think I will start compiling a list of all the literary elders who have appeared in the books I love. Maybe even a list of the literary elders who have written the books I cherish. Like the old fisherman Santiago in Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea? Or the aged Wang Lung and O-lan at the end of Pearl Buck's The Good Earth. The list is endless. If you have some favorites of your own, leave a comment here with their titles. We'll grow a list together!

I'll end this holiday note with blessings for the New Year, and by sharing one of my favorite photos from the 2009 River Writing and Sculpting Journey - Lorilyn celebrating on party night with her 80-year-young mother, Lorraine. You can't help but smile!

Thank you to Jaime Aguilar and the American Indian College Fund for use of the dinner photos.

Read The Denver Post article by Tina Griego.

The Grand Design of Our Lives: Connecting the Synchronistic Dots

2009-12-15T12:53:00.004-07:00

SYNCHRONISTIC MOMENTS - seemingly unrelated events that connect in unplanned ways. How often do they occur? How often do we fail to "connect the dots" that tie these moments together? What do they tell us about the Grand Design of our lives?

When the old man in John Steinbeck's collection The Pastures of Heaven stared down into the valley where he had lived his life, tears came to his eyes and he beat his hands helplessly against his hip. "I’ve never had time to think," he said. "I’ve been too busy with troubles ever to think anything out. If I could go down there and live down there for a little while—why, I’d think over all the things that ever happened to me, and maybe I could make something out of them, something all in one piece that had a meaning, instead of all these trailing ends.”

All those trailing ends--the threads of our lives that we long to weave into something whole and meaningful. But how do we begin the braiding?

Sometimes it helps to simply "connect the dots." Identify points of intersection in seemingly unrelated events. Don't try to attach meaning yet, just marvel at the places where your life comes together. Here are some of the latest synchronistic moments in my life that connect in delightful and curious ways. Who knows where the trail will lead? Who knows where your trail is leading?

DOT #1: November, 2008, I attend a keynote talk with Richard Louv (author, Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature Deficit Disorder and Chairman, Children and Nature Network) at the Denver Museum of Science and Nature. As a Senior Associate with the Children and Nature Network, and a friend of Rich's, I'm a huge advocate of the "Leave No Child Inside" initiative. Rich gave me a great blurb when Fulcrum Publishing brought out the trade paperback version of my memoir In Search of Kinship, a collection of personal stories about raising my kids outdoors.

DOT #2: September, 2009, I attend Fulcrum Publishing's 25th anniversary celebration and meet Kirk Johnson, Chief Curator at the Denver Museum of Science and Nature. We talk about getting together to discuss ways to bring a more rural/ranching/children/nature component to the museum.

DOT #3: October, 2009, while participating in a strategic planning committee meeting for the Colorado Alliance for Environmental Education I meet Pavlos Stavropoulos, Sustainability Director at the Woodbine Ecology Center, and am immediately impressed with his passionate, forward thinking, cooperative approach to problem-solving.

Dot #4: December, 2009, I attend the 30th anniversary celebration for The Bloomsbury Review - 30 years of publishing "the finest Book Magazine in the land." Marilyn Auer (pictured), co-founder, publisher and editor, has been gifting me with complimentary copies for my retreat participants for years. I leave with 50 copies in tow.

Ed Warner, director of the Sand County Foundation, introduces himself and we strike up a conversation. The Foundation started back in 1965 as caretaker of the 120-acre Aldo Leopold Memorial Reserve. A community-based conservation network, they are a vital tool for reconnecting people and the natural world, "harnessing the experiences of rural people and policies in Africa and North America."

Here's Ed's favorite photo of himself kneeling and taking a wild rhino's pulse while administering oxygen (taken at the Save Valley Conservancy near Chiredzi, Zimbabwe). Ed has a contagious enthusiasm for life with a non-jaded abiliity to allow life to surprise him, and to share that surprise with others. It's delightful.

Dot #5: It turns out Ed and I know many of the same people, including Richard Knight (professor, Warner College of Natural Resources at CSU) and co-editor of Home Land: Ranching and a West that Works and the Quivira Coalition director Courtney White. It also turns out that Ed is a Trustee of the Denver Museum of Nature and Science (see Dot #2), and knows Kirk Johnson. It also turns out that Ed has spent hundreds of volunteer hours reconnecting children to the outdoors.

Dot #6: After Ed and his wife leave the Bloomsbury party, I talk more with Pavlos of the Woodbine Ecology Center. Woodbine is guided, in part, by the Seventh Generation Principle, an Iroquois belief that the decisions we make today should be based on how the next seven generations will be impacted by those decisions.

Pavlos speaks about his own indigenous and migratory Greek roots. "We are all indigenous," he says, "even if we're descendants of slaves, or indentured servants, or refugees, or voluntary immigrants. We find ourselves—people of all colors and nations—here to stay. This is now our home and the home of our children and great-great grandchildren." (read more at Woodbine's Vision).

I tell Pavlos of the six generations of ranching roots that tie my grown children to Colorado, how their great-great-great grandparents migrated to the healing high country air of Colorado to save their asthmatic son's life. "I wrote In Search of Kinship," I say, "because I believe these roots can be transplanted; that they do not need to shrivel and die. Our stories keep them alive." Pavlos nods his head in agreement.

Dot #7: The next day, I browse the history page on Woodbine's website and learn that the Center is located on Indian Creek, in Sedalia, Colorado. I smile at the synchronicity. This photo is of my son Matt with his grandmother, Edie Lambert Higby. The Lambert Ranch was homesteaded in 1862 in the heart of Indian Creek Valley. It was on this creek, in the heart of Chief Colorow's Ute country, that my children's father grew up. "Colorow was reported to have traveled to Sedalia," the history page states, "where he attempted to trade a horse and some beads for the baby of the Manhart family, one of the founders of Sedalia..."

My daughter is named after Sarah Manhart, and it was with her great-grandmother's uncle that Chief Colorow tried to trade. I tell the story in the prologue of In Search of Kinship. "'I remember pulling on Mother's skirts,' said the baby's older sister, 'and begging her not to make the trade.'" In the photo on the right, I am standing at Sarah Manhart's grave marker in Sedalia.

Though we no longer live on the Lambert Ranch in Sedalia, when my daughter Sarah has a child, and my son Matt, these children will be the seventh generation to carry on this legacy of the land. (photo on the left: Sarah riding her mare Magpie)

Are these simply synchronicities? What do they reveal about the Grand Design of my life, and the lives of my son and daughter?

What “dots” can you connect in your life? What will they reveal about your journey?

Farm City, Deeply Rooted, and Each Featherless Wing

2009-11-29T13:44:00.002-07:00

According to The Wall Street Journal, 46 million domestic, farm-raised turkeys were devoured this week (including the 13 pound turkey whose bones have been stewing in my soup kettle until an hour ago). It’s probably fair to say that none of us ever saw “our bird” fully feathered, or heard it gobble, or knew whether a “hen” or a “jake” was gracing our dinner platter. I haven’t had this kind of intimate relationship with a Thanksgiving turkey since leaving our Wyoming ranch a few years ago, and I miss it.
The picture below was taken by Seven J Outfitters on land adjacent to our ranch. I do not know these hunters but no doubt I’ve seen this turkey’s brethren foraging on our hay meadow. These are the same turkeys my son and daughter watched through the seasons when growing up, including hunting season. “If they’re too many jakes,” my son once told me, “they’ll harass the nesting hens, and not enough eggs will hatch.” He used to spend days out in the woods, studying the bands of wild turkeys. If this photo stirs you in any way, I hope you’ll respond by posting a comment.
In the fall, the wild turkeys that I used to share this land with loved to graze the acorns that gathered beneath the bur oaks. They also loved the hay meadows, where it was harder for a coyote or bob cat to sneak up on them. I imagine they still do.
Had the 46 million domestic turkeys eaten this week been born wild, like the Merriam’s wild turkey of the ponderosa forests of the West, only 25 percent of them might have survived beyond their first few weeks of life. Those that did might have lived for a year or two, maybe three, but it’s the rare and wise wild turkey that could escape both disease and predation to see a tenth birthday.
Like the coyotes who prey on the turkeys, I find myself mostly at peace with the role of predator. My eyes, like the coyote’s or the eagle’s or the mountain lion’s or the fox, are located in the front of my head. My teeth, too, are designed for tearing flesh. I trust nature’s grand design. What I am not at peace with are the insidious and mutated forms of predation that now seem to define our species.
Yesterday, with the taste of Thanksgiving still lingering on my tongue, and memories still stirring my heart, I read an article on the New York Time’s book editors’ top 10 reads for 2009. Dwight Garner’s selections included the memoir Farm City:The Education of an Urban Farmer by Novella Carpenter. “A moving meditation on urban life versus the natural world,” wrote the publisher Penguin Press, “and what we’ve given up to live the way we do.”
The intersection of anything rural and urban intrigues me. Here was a memoir about a young woman who grubbed out a small garden plot from a dirt lot in a drug-infested ghetto in Oakland and started growing not only herbs and vegetables, but ducks and rabbits and even two Red Duroc pigs. I clicked on a link to Garner’s June 11 book review:

“At heart,” he writes, “Farm City is more about Ms. Carpenter’s experiences with livestock than it is about growing plump tomatoes. In fact Farm City is a serious, if tragicomic, meditation on raising and then killing your own animals. She wants to have “a dialogue with life,” she writes, and realizes she can do that only by also having a dialogue with death.”

Bravo, Ms. Carpenter! We Americans shy away from death, or at least from hands-on death. We shy away from admitting that nothing lives that something does not die. We rarely anoint our own dead, and rarely wonder about the lives of the things we eat to nourish our own bodies.
Yesterday I was also reading High Country News. I came across Andrea Appleton’s review of Deeply Rooted: Unconventional Farmers in the Age of Agribusiness by Lisa Hamilton. (November 9, High Country News). “In this narrative nonfiction book,” writes the publisher, “Hamilton tells three stories, of an African-American dairyman in Texas who plays David to the Goliath of agribusiness corporations; a tenth-generation rancher in New Mexico struggling to restore agriculture as a pillar of his community; and a modern pioneer family in North Dakota…” Click here for a SLIDE SHOW of the people in these three stories. Click here to read Appleton’s REVIEW, “For farmers, small is beautiful.”
This year’s turkey carcass has been simmering on the stove for two days. When I took the pot out of the refrigerator this morning, the broth was a thick, protein-rich gelatin. The meat is now stripped from the bones and I’m about to dice the celery and chop the onions and shred the carrots. Making this soup feels like an act of gratitude, a prayerful way to spend a few hours regardless of whether the turkey lived a wild life, or a confined one. But I will miss the slight taste of wild acorns that used to grace the Thanksgiving soup I made back at the ranch. I will squeeze all the intimacy from these bones that I can—each leg bone, each rib, each featherless and flightless wing.
Deeply Rooted: Unconventional Farmers in the Age of Agribusiness, Counterpoint Press, May, 2009.
Farm City, Novella Carpenter, The Penguin Press, June, 2009.

NEWS FLASH! Colum McCann Wins National Book Award

2009-11-20T09:32:00.001-07:00

I met Colum 4 years ago (please see previous post below) and am thrilled Let the Great World Spin has won. Go to NPR to learn more and read about it from the Associated Press News Release. Here’s an excerpt:

“McCann won the fiction prize for "Let the Great World Spin," a novel about daring, luck and mortality in the pre-digital world of 1970s New York.

“He has called his book an act of hope written in part as a response to the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. Accepting his prize, McCann praised the generosity of American fiction and of the American people.”

Colum McCann. Luck of the Irish? Or just a fine, fine novelist?

2009-11-08T10:34:00.001-07:00

“A summer flood came and our draft horse got caught in the river. The river smashed against stones and the sound of it to me was like the turning of locks. It was silage time and the water smelled of grass. The draft horse, Father’s favorite, had stepped in the river for a sniff maybe and she was caught, couldn’t move, her foreleg trapped between rocks. Father found her and called Katie! above the wailing rain. I was in the barn waiting for drips on my tongue from the ceiling hole.”

These are the opening words to Colum McCann’s short story “Everything in This Country Must,” first published in The Atlantic in 2001 and later published in book form (along with another short story and a novella) by Macmillan/Picador.

I met Colum McCann in June of 2005 at the Aspen Summer Words Literary Festival in Colorado. Colum was part of an impressive lineup of Irish authors, including Robert Boswell, Grande Dame Edna O’Brien, Polly Devlin, Nuala O’Faolain, Paul Muldoon, and Marie Ponsot. (Photo of Colum by Brendan Bourke.) I knew that I was in the presence of a writer

whose greatness was as apparent as his magnetism. Colum, (born in Dublin in 1965), was approachable, handsome, and sensual (with a lovely wife). A few minutes later, as he began to read the 14-page short story, “Everything in This Country Must,” we were quickly enfolded in the charm of his Irish voice. Afterwards, we watched the short film based on the story, which had won 16 top awards at major film festivals and was nominated for an Academy Award Oscar.

The story is about a work horse that gets caught in the roaring creek, the farmer who can’t save his prize Belgium, the teenage daughter who’s trying to help, the British soldiers who rescue the horse, the same soldiers who, two years prior, had accidentally crushed the car in which the farmer’s son and wife were sitting. It all comes full circle. The farmer is in such deep dark place of grief and impotence and anger and fear that in the end, after the soldiers are gone, he goes to the barn and kills the horse he loves because, perhaps, he cannot bear the thought that he must forgive the country,and the soldiers, who took his wife from him. An entire, exquisitely wrought and painful world is contained in this short story.

Colum’s sixth novel, Let the Great World Spin, (Random House) is a 2009 National Book Award Finalist, and was called “One of the most electric, profound novels of the year” by The NY Times Book Review. It was also just picked by Amazon.com as Editors’ #1 Pick of their Top Ten for 2009. Colum’s novel Dancer (Picador, 2004), received the prestigious Irish Novel of the Year award. CLICK HERE for dates of Colum’s November and December, 2009, New York and Amsterdam appearances.

NOW, I’d like to take a moment to pay homage to Nuala O’Faolain, who also spoke at the Aspen Summer Words Festival in 2005. Known as Ireland’s female counterpart to Frank McCourt, her memoir Are You Somebody? was on the NY Times bestseller list for 17 weeks. Nuala was bold, outspoken, funny, had no fear, and was passionate about the rights of women in Ireland. She sat down to write her life story with no intention of publication – and thus “told all” in the book. She was hilarious and impassioned and took over the panel discussion in Aspen in a way that thrilled all of us in the audience.

“I was only writing my life story,” she said, “with no intention of it being read by anyone.” One day, she was walking down the lane and a tall woman came toward her and congratulated her on the book. “I told her, I’d never intended to get all this attention, and the woman said to me, ‘Stand by it. It’s your life. Stand by it.’”

I was so moved by her belief in the importance of women’s stories that I gifted her with a copy of In Search of Kinship, which now seems like a presumptuous thing to do. A week later, I received a note from her. She told me that she read my memoir on the return flight, cover to cover. And when she finished, “I left it on my seat in the plane, so that it would gift the next traveler in the same way it had gifted me.”

Nuala died three years later, in 2008, of lung cancer. Her message to us, even now, is to stand by our lives, to recognize that each emotion we experience ties us more deeply to all of humanity. We do not need to destroy that which we love the most because we fear our own vulnerability in the face of that love. We only need to move more deeply into what it means to be a human being.

Elk Velvet, Begging Bowls, and Rumi: Unexpected Gifts

2009-10-20T14:22:00.002-06:00

Each fall, I search the woods for antler velvet, like other women might browse catalogs for good sales on winter coats. It’s an odd habit, I admit. During the last few weeks of August and into September here in the rustic mountain community where I live, bachelor herds of bull elk congregate in the meadows and woods surrounding our home. Even from a distance, you can see their engorged antlers grow thick with velvet as their bodies flesh out from rich mountain grass.
As the color fades from the brilliant Indian Paintbrush, the elk begin scratching their antlers on the trunks of sapling aspens and pines. One day, while hiking with our Border collie Trixie, I followed four big bulls who had strips of velvet hanging from their tender, bloody tines. I searched the ground beneath the trees where they stopped to rub their antlers, searching for a strip of shredded velvet, each time thinking this will be the place. But it never was. I found shredded pieces of bark and fresh droppings beneath their rubs, but never that coveted bit of velvet. I felt like I was searching for the end of a story which remained forever just beyond my reach – close enough to see, almost to touch – but as elusive as the mythical powers of the elk.
After following the four bulls for an hour, I turned around to head back home. Trixie scampered ahead of me on the trail, stopping to sniff around the trunk of a ponderosa. Dejected, I sat on a granite rock to catch my breath before climbing the final steep leg of the hike home. Within a few minutes, Trixie returned to my side carrying something in her mouth. She sat down next to me, nudged my empty hand, then dropped a soft strip of fur into it. I rubbed my fingers along its edge, then turned it over and saw the bloody underside. Antler velvet. I was holding a piece of antler velvet. “You crazy dog,” I said, and then I rose and let Trixie lead me back down the path toward the ponderosa.
Sue Bender, in her book Everyday Sacred: A Woman’s Journey Home, writes: “All I knew about a begging bowl was that each day a monk goes out with his empty bowl in his hands. Whatever is placed in the bowl will be his nourishment for the day…”
For writers, every time we venture into the metaphorical world of story and face that blank computer screen, or blank journal, we are seeking nourishment. We are also, ritualistically, practicing faith. Faith that if we offer our metaphorical empty bowl to the gods, we will eventually be gifted with a story.
Each hike into the woods is, for me, also a journey of faith. Sometimes, usually, I return home empty-handed. But not always. Sometimes, like that day following the elk, I return with a story to tell and renewed sense of wonder. Sometimes, I don’t even have to leave home. Sometimes, the wonder comes to me, like the morning a few weeks ago when these slick-antlered bulls showed up in the back yard. John and I filled our coffee cups, put Trixie on a leash, tiptoed outside, and sat in our lawn chairs and watched as they browsed and snorted and parried.
Gifts. They are all around us.
In Rumi’s poem “The Gift of Water” he tell us that every object and being in the universe is a jar overfilled with wisdom and beauty. “Do you see?” he asks.

You knock at the door of reality,
shake your thought-wings, loosen
your shoulders,

and open.

Do you see?
More about the analogy of the begging bowl.
More about Jelaluddin Rumi.
News Item: On November 21, Page is teaching a one-day seminar at Mt. Vernon Country Club on “Writing the Personal Essay.” Details at www.pagelambert.com.

Why Vultures Lie in Wait, and Deepak Chopra’s Law of Least Effort

2009-08-20T12:52:00.001-06:00

I grew up believing that STRIVING towards goals and feeling DRIVEN in one’s passions were necessary components of success. They can also be exhausting components of success.

Deepak Chopra, in his book The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success, talks about the Law of Least Effort. “Nature’s intelligence functions with effortless ease…this is the principle of least action, of no resistance.”

But what of all those long tedious hours of writing and rewriting? What of all the hours spent networking, following up leads, peaking under every stone for missed opportunities?

The carrion-eating vultures I encounter on early-morning hikes got me to thinking that maybe Deepak Chopra is right. “Grass doesn’t try to grow, it just grows,” he tells us. “Birds don’t try to fly, they fly.”

Vultures are “least effort” opportunists, willing to watch and wait, poking their bald red heads into putrefying places and coming up with enough to feed themselves and their not-too-picky young. Patient enough to wait—yet dedicated enough to spend long hours in the sky, catching updraft after updraft.

Vultures are also creatures of habit. The vultures that live on my home mountain wake up early, fly to their favorite granite outcropping, and patiently wait for the sun to rise so that they can dry the dew from their wing feathers. This patient ritual pays homage to the sun. They stand still as statues, slowly spreading their 6-foot expanse of wing, looking prayerful as the sun’s warmth sinks into their bones.

But stories don’t write themselves. Writers can’t just sit and wait. So what can we learn from Deepak’s Law of Least Effort?

“Think of your physical body as a device for controlling energy,” Chopra writes, “it can generate, store, and expend energy.”

Maybe the vultures aren’t just drying the dew from their wings, maybe they’re storing sun power. Have you ever arisen early in the morning and gone outside with a book you’ve been meaning to read for years finally tucked under your arm? Basked in its warmth for an hour or two, soaking up every beautifully described scene, every graceful turn of phrase?

When we SIT WITH ANOTHER AUTHOR’S WORK, fully present, still as a statue, we are gathering up the energy we will need to write our own story. Think of every beautiful book you’ve ever read as energy stored within you, patiently waiting to be reshaped into a new story, a new truth. Gratitude for the work of others releases this stored energy and allows it to flow almost effortlessly into our work.

Dedicate at least ten minutes a day to standing in awe of what someone else has written. Feel the fullness it brings. Then spread your wings and get out there and find your stories.

Soaring is an important part of scavenging, and dedication to one’s goals is not the same as exhaustive striving or feeling driven. Dedication is more like prayer, a product of the heart, not the head.

The Wind in the Willows & Love of Place

2009-07-25T08:38:00.005-06:00

Kathleen Cain begins her review of Standing in the Light by Sharman Apt Russell (Bloomsbury Review, May/June/July 2009; http://www.bloomsburyreview.com/) this way: “I’ve been waiting for this book all my life…I am urged to awe that equals spiritual fervor in the presence of Nature.”
What is it about Nature—Nature with a capitol N as depicted in Sharman’s new book—that moves us so? How can the physical world cause our spirits to have such passionate responses?

On May 4, 2009, Time Magazine chose The Wind in the Willows as its “Book Pick for the Week.” This classic children’s novel, a compilation of stories told by the author Kenneth Grahame to his four-year-old son, was first published in America in 1909. One hundred years ago! Yet here we are today, still falling in love with Mole and Rat and Badger and Otter and yes, even arrogant Toad—creatures great and small who live charmed lives full of missteps and dangerous escapades at, or near, the River. Not just any river, but THE River. As in NATURE. All caps. It is the River that forms the landscape of their lives and serves as metaphor for ours. It teaches them, and us, about the hospitality of community.

A couple of years ago, I attended the annual conference of the Quivira Coalition in Albuquerque, New Mexico. I was there to do a book-signing for Home Land: Ranching and a West that Works (Rocky Mountain Land Library). Renowned writer Wendell Barry was the keynote speaker. The Quivira Coalition was formed in 2003, when “twenty ranchers, environmentalists, and scientists met for forty-eight hours to figure out a way to take back the American West…”

A community of people seeking to “find a way to make ourselves worthy of the land we all love” evolved from this initial gathering. And though these individuals were as different from one another as were Mole and Rat and Badger and Otter and Toad, their love of place, of the landscape where they lived their lives, was greater than the divisive issues that had, in the past, kept them apart.

While in Albuquerque at the Quivira Conference, I also had a chance to visit with Peter Forbes, founder of the Center for Whole Communities. “How is it that those of us who care about people and those of us who care about the land, have ended up divided from one another?” the Center asks. “What might we achieve if movements for environmental and social change worked together for healthy, whole communities?” The Center poses this question on their website, where you can view an 8-minute presentation on reweaving people, land, and communities. “Story is the way we carry the land inside of us,” writes Peter Forbes in his book, What Is A Whole Community. “We tell stories to cross the borders that separate us from one another.”

In this same spirit of reweaving, Sharman’s blog, “Love of Place,” celebrates and promotes a “greater relationship and intimacy with the natural world.” She does not advocate a natural world without human beings, though she often writes passionately and with firm opinions about how we interact with the land. (Her perspective and mine on public land grazing probably differ greatly, in great part because she writes about the arid southwest, while my experience is with the forests and grasslands of the Black Hills of Wyoming—much different ecosystems.)

In Standing in the Light, when writing about the environmentally threatened Gila River, Sharman asks who cares about a dead river, what does it mean to care? She tells us of sitting in a meeting packed with men and women who had come to watch a slide show about saving the river. “Outside, the soft August night still smells of rain,” she writes. “The clay in the soil has released compounds like those found in urine, a distinct acrid odor. Walking back to my house, I hear an owl hoot, and I click off the flashlight, letting my eyes adjust to the darkness.”

I cherish these points of intersection, where Sharman’s world and mine come together—where I hear the owl hoot as if I were there walking with her, because, on the ranch in the Black Hills where I reared my children, I, too, listened to the hooting of owls and smelled the acrid odor of clay soil.

When Wendell Barry gave the keynote talk at the Quivira Coalition’s annual conference, more than 500 people attended. I could not help but smile when I scanned the room. The audience was filled with men, women, and children, as different looking from one another as the critters in The Wind in the Willows. Some wore cowboy hats. Some wore Birkenstocks. Some wore Forest Service uniforms. Some wore Park Service uniforms. Some wore Wranglers and denim jackets. Some wore microfleece and Sahara pants. Here was a true gathering of people from all walks of life. But they shared one thing in common—their love of Place.

I hope Sharman and I can sit down soon and talk about the issues we hold close to our hearts—those that lead us closer to the Divine and about which Sharman speaks so eloquently in Standing in the Light. “How should I live in the world,” she asks. “How can I face my death?” “How can I be more joyous?” These are intimate questions, soul-piercing questions to ponder while walking on a favorite trail at dusk, as the evening light draws near, or perhaps while floating down a sunlit river with someone who was, only moments ago, a stranger.

Mushrooms, Growing Our Writing, and Parabola Magazine

2009-07-10T14:04:00.010-06:00

Wine kept cool in dark cellars. Whiskey aging in oak barrels. Bread dough set out to rise on the counter. A chicken breast marinating in soy and ginger. The lacy white filaments of a mushroom root buried in damp compost. A poem fleshed out, then tucked away in a drawer. The germinating seed of a short story. The landscape of a novel unfurling after a dormant winter. All these things do better given time to ripen.

We’ve had abundant moisture this spring and early summer. The Rocky Mountains are awash in wild flowers. And wild mushrooms. They’re everywhere. Sprouting stubborn caps in gravelly soil. Pushing up through needle-covered ground beneath ponderosas. They’re in the sun. In the shade. Under logs. Next to rocks. Growing in between the bunch grasses and among the penstemons.

Several years ago, the Wyoming Center for the Book asked many of the Wyoming Arts Council literary fellowship recipients and a few other notable authors living in Wyoming to write essays for the anthology Deep West: A Literary Tour of Wyoming (Pronghorn Press, 2003). They asked us to explore how our work had been influenced or not influenced by life in Wyoming; what our views were on regionalism in literature; and what issues of Place interested us.

We were given almost a year’s advance notice. Plenty of time to let an idea percolate. Of course, writers as accomplished as Annie Proulx probably didn’t need much time. But I did. I felt deeply rooted to the landscape where I lived, but also felt deeply rooted to the Colorado landscape from which I had come. When I spent fourteen days in the depths of the Grand Canyon and felt totally at home, I ventured to ask myself: What is this thing called Place?

One of the writer’s resources that I keep on hand, and have been subscribing to for several years, is Parabola, published by the Society for Myth and Tradition. What I love about the magazine is that each issue explores a single theme from a multi-cultural perspective. Want to know more about humanity’s place in the cosmic order? Read the “The Tree of Life” interview with Nobel Peace Prize winner Wangari Maathai in the Fall, 2007 issue Holy Earth. Want to know more about knowledge? Read Mara Freeman’s Celtic essay “Eating the Salmon of Wisdom” in the Spring, 1997 issue Ways of Knowing.

Several months before the essay was due, I sat down with Parabola’s Summer 1993 issue, Place and Space, and began reading. I highlighted passages and quotes from essays. I savored epicycles and reread poems. I fell gratefully into the responses of Robert Lawlor in the interview with him “Dreaming a Beginning” in which he talks about the Aborigines of Australia. “In a sense we are all indigenous people in that we are all of the earth,” he said.

In a sense we are all indigenous people in that we are all of the earth. What a comforting thought--that each of us is indeed native to the earth. I let that thought simmer for several weeks, perhaps for a few months. Not in a preoccupied way, but in the quiet way evening shadows have of creeping over the land. What I read crept over me and the essay began to form itself, even though I hadn’t yet written a word. It was gestating in the dark chambers of my heart and mind.

I was preparing the writing. Not procrastinating, but preparing--garnering wisdom so that I would be wise enough to write.

“What is this thing called place?" I eventually asked the reader. "How can we be so deeply rooted to it, yet so easily transplanted from it? If a sacred place is where two worlds intersect, can it also be a place where two stories meet?”

In posing these questions for myself, and the reader, I came closer to understanding what I did not know--an important step in growing stories, and wisdom.

Writing, and preparing ourselves to write, allows us to unearth hidden knowledge, hidden meaning, and hidden purpose. It’s best not to rush these things. When we plant our ideas in the compost of time and allow some distance from them, they often rise fully formed, and perhaps if we’re lucky, even with a touch of brilliance as breathtaking as a mushroom pushing up from the earth.

Mushroom photos by Page Lambert, taken near Mt. Vernon in the foothills west of Denver, Colorado. If you would like a copy of Page's essay, "This Thing Called Place," please leave a comment here on the blog requesting one, along with your email. Or contact Page directly at page@pagelambert.com. To subscribe to Parabola magazine or check their submission guidelines, go to http://www.parabola.org/.

Cultivating a Literary Garden

2009-05-25T11:16:00.009-06:00

Plant the Seeds of Intention
The dog days of summer, when Sirius, the “dog star,” rises and sets with the sun, will soon be upon us. Hot sultry weather. Balmy nights. Screen doors and porch swings. Iced lemonade and fresh peach ice cream. The long sagas of our lives lived at a lazy pace.

Sound like the summer of a by-gone era? For many of us, there is nothing slow or lazy about summer. Fall arrives and we glance back over our sun-burned shoulders wondering why we didn’t read more books, or work on that novel, or fill at least one journal with poetic prose. Our writing aspirations, along with the dog, were left to languish on that figurative summer porch.

Cultivating a literary summer garden doesn’t have to be hard work, but it won’t flourish unless you plant seeds of clear intention. Identify your goals, scatter them among your other activities, and fertilize them with attentiveness. Here’s a two-pronged tool to get you started.

Explore Your Literary Neighborhood
There are more reasons than ever to stay close to home this summer, to travel the literary back roads of your neighborhood, your state, your region. The West is abundant with authors of award-winning books. Since 1971, the Colorado Center for the Book has been recognizing with annual awards the best novels, poetry, works of nonfiction, anthologies, biographies, histories, children’s books, fine press, and pictorial publications. (A list of the Colorado Book Award winners is available from Kris Rabida at Colorado Humanities, (303) 894-7951, or rabida@coloradohumanities.org. If you live in Wyoming, check out the Wyoming Center for the Book, or think about attending the Wyoming Book Festival in Cheyenne. Or go to the National Center for the Book website, click on your affiliated state organization, and search their site for literary events in your area.

Here's another way to begin planting your literary garden. This summer, set aside a few hours each week. Pluck one book each week (preferably in the genre in which you write) from the list of award winners in your state. Take that book with you to your local café or nearby park. By the end of the summer, you will have harvested a working knowledge of your genre at the regional level, and you will have a much better idea of which books are winning these coveted awards, and why. I plan on picking up a copy of Bruce Decker's Home Pool: Stories of Fly Fishing and Lesser Passions (a 2009 Colorado Book Award fiction/literary finalist) and taking it with me on my River Writing and Sculpting Journey for Women in August.

Explore Your Physical Neighborhood
In 1985, Johnson Books of Boulder (Big Earth Publishing) published the quiet little book Seven Half Miles from Home by Wyoming author Mary Back. For twenty years, Mary, an artist, left her home each morning before breakfast and took a one-mile walk, a half-mile out, and a half-mile back. “The record of her observations became a conscious immersion in the body of life,” wrote Library Journal in their review. “She began to study seven different ecological communities including thickets, desert, swamp, forest, and river.”

Explore the terrain within a half-mile of your home. Explore what it means to be a westerner. Learn the names of the plants, trees, animals, and birds that share your neighborhood. Create a character sketch of them. Are they native to the area? Deciduous? Nocturnal? Do they mate for life? Where do they spend their winters? Sit with your journal among your favorite family of lichen-covered boulders and ponder their history and genetics. Pick a few characters from the novel you’re writing, or the memoir you’re crafting, and learn about the flora and fauna in their neighborhoods.

Start a list of your favorite regional poets. Commit to buying 3 books of poetry this summer from that list. Begin a dialogue with your favorite poems from those books. Each week, pick a poem, read it twice, then write a response to it (no rules, anything goes, just write). You might enjoy Open Range: Poetry of the Reimagined West (Ghost Road Press) edited by my friend Laurie Wagner Buyer and her husband WC Jameson, or Tamped: Loose Enough to Breath by Mark Todd, an exploration of the interaction between man and nature.

Pick up a copy of Susan Tweit’s award-winning book Colorado Scenic Byways, enjoy the gorgeous photography by Jim Steinberg, then plan a road trip. Or get a copy of Candy Moulton's Roadside History of Wyoming, take a journal with you, stop at all the greasy spoons and hidden hideaways, and pilfer as many tidbits of overheard dialogue as you can. Then, just for fun, sprinkle a few of these tidbits into the mouths of your characters and let them take over the story for awhile. You might be surprised at what you’ll glean from this playful scattering of seed, fresh from the tongues of locals.

This article first appeared in the May 2009 issue of InPrint, the official newsletter of the Colorado Authors' League.

Walking Nature Home: Are We Our Mothers' Daughters?

2009-05-01T11:22:00.024-06:00

In some ways, choosing to write only about the few times in Walking Nature Home where Susan Tweit writes about her mother is like describing a single sea shell when the entire ocean stretches before you. So I urge you to journey on your own into the tide-deep waters of this memoir. You will find an intimate world inhabited by much more than a single shell.

Explore her author's notes. You'll appreciate the sources she references and the useful way in which she categorizes them. Astrology and Star Lore. Astronomy. Autoimmune diseases. Community of the Land and Ecology. Gardening. Health and Healing. Quakerism. Science. These are the myriad, sometimes turbulent, but always thoughtful waters inhabited by her memoir.

"To my eyes," writes Susan, "my mom is beautiful, with large blue eyes, a cap of wavy silver hair framing her tan face, and a ready, charming smile. The notes in her health log, though, reveal the pain of swollen and distorted joints, the debilitating curve in her spine, the digits frozen or twisted into unnatural angles, her stick-thin arms and legs."

Both our mothers suffer(ed) from debilitating and chronic disease. Susan's mother, married to a scientist with a doctorate in organic chemistry and still alive, has great faith in western medicine. My mother, married for twenty-five years to a visionary but complicated man who founded the financial planning profession, followed dual paths of healing while she was alive. Susan's mother wrote of the "disappointment when each drug, so promising at the start, became less and less effective; of days when her body felt like a battleground.”

I remember standing in front of the bathroom mirror with my mother after her fifth surgery, this time for breast cancer. The lymph pump was still connected to the red, swollen tissue in the caverns where her right breast and lymph glands had been. She smiled, rather wistfully, as she stared at her battered body. But as always, she was pragmatic and positive. Much to her doctors’ amazement, she rallied again and again, and continued to take mega doses of IP-6.

“Before arthritis,” Susan writes, “my mother wore three rings: her engagement diamond, a slender gold wedding band, and an antique Italian cameo passed down from her mother’s aunt. When Mom’s finger joints became so swollen that her rings had to be cut and bridged, she gave the cameo to me.

“One afternoon, I was trimming her nails… As I cradled her cold and bloodless hands gingerly in mine, I was struck by the juxtaposition of our fingers, hers swollen, crooked, and painful, mine still slender and relatively straight… I felt the stiffness in my joints and fear stabbed by gut: I saw my mother’s hands in mine. And I swore that I would not allow my body to become a battlefield.”

Take it back, this living will that condemns us both.

That line is from a poem of mine, written when my mother was still alive. I understand Susan’s fear. It is mine, too. And my sister’s. Must we inherit your diseases? we asked silently, even as we knelt to rub peppermint oil on her swollen knees.

But Susan’s book is not about fear. It is about channeling fear back into the river bed where the waters of life flow. Like the waters that flow through the industrialized banks of Ditch Creek in Salida, Colorado, which Susan and her husband Richard live. Susan has transformed her fear into fertile soil, fertile enough to grow strawberries and eggplant and sugar snap peas and summer squash, enough to feed them for months, enough to share with neighbors.

Are we are our mothers’ daughters? If we are, then we must remember to claim all of them, not just their frailties and illnesses. Susan inherited “luminous fibers” from her mother, who was born and raised near San Francisco Bay. “’For some people,” Susan quotes Barry Lopez in her book, “what they are is not finished at the skin, but continues with the reach of the senses out into the land….Such people are connected to the land as if by luminous fibers….’”

Susan’s mother had a “feel for sea cliff, wave form, and beach sand” that “was honed on the central California coast, her affinity for desert shaped by visits to her grandparents in Tucson….” My mother was raised by a deaf mother in the Mohave Desert, and as a young woman moved to Berkeley, California, where she met my father. They later moved to Colorado, where I was born, and where Susan lives.

My mother grew to love the mountains of Colorado. She chose to live the last twenty years of her life in these mountains. And now I live here too, in the same home where she died. I sleep in the same bedroom where I last held her in my arms as she grasped my hands. I look out at the same gangly Ponderosa pines and at the occasional deer walking the same backyard trail. Susan watches a muskrat burrowing along the creek and a red fox hunting amidst the Indian ricegrass.

To find yourself engaged in a beautiful book written by a kindred spirit is one of life’s greatest gifts, especially a book with as many layers as Walking Nature Home. “Susan Tweit has written a glorious love story,” writes Kathleen Dean Moore, “to her Rocky Mountain sage meadows, to her husband Richard, to her own unreliable body. I read this book long into the night, lifted by the beauty of the story….”

To read more about mother/daughter health connections, read Mother-Daughter Wisdom: Creating a Legacy of Physical and Emotional Health by Christiane Northrup, M.D., available from Random House.

Read Susan's Walking Nature Home blog.

Lessons from the Land: Columbine High School, Wild Turkey Hunting, and Hidden Scars

2009-04-20T08:29:00.008-06:00

Ten years ago today our 16-year-old son Matt wandered the ponderosa forests of Wyoming’s Bear Lodge Mountains near our ranch with a twelve-gauge shotgun, a couple of apples, deer jerky, a few sandwiches, and two hunting buddies. It was opening day of wild turkey season.

400 miles south, on this same day, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold terrorized and killed 12 students and one teacher at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. Before the day was over, they too would be dead. I spent most of my growing up years in Littleton, a town whose roots spread from the foothills west into the Rocky Mountains, and east into the shortgrass prairies. The ancestors of the Merriam turkeys that now wander the Bear Lodge Mountains of Wyoming were once native to the ponderosa forests of Colorado.

My son had been excited about opening day for months. This was his first turkey hunt. He and his two friends (one an experienced hunter and wildlife artist, the other a member of a professional outfitting family), had all received parent-approved-leave to miss school that day. All three young men had taken the required Hunter Safety Courses.

On our small ranch we received only two television stations. As I watched the news of the tragic shooting in Littleton, I also envisioned my son and his friends hiking the hills, shotguns pointing downward, turkey calls spilling forth from voices deepening with the promise of manhood. I worried for their safety, trusted in their good sense, gave thanks for the stories they would learn from the land, and grieved for the people in my hometown of Littleton.

During the winter, Matt and his friends had hiked miles and miles of hills and woods—scouting for coyotes, marveling at bull-sized elk tracks, treasuring antlers shed by fleet white-tailed deer. They had bugled, howled, and crowed during their jaunts—discovering each other’s skills and weaknesses. They had sparred and parried, much like the turkeys they were hunting. But for Matt, this day was different—this day was a rite of passage.

They arrived at their carefully chosen hill in the predawn and began the challenge of calling in the birds. The call of a dominant wild turkey is like his strut—proud and boastful. I have heard the wild calls many times, but it was Matt who really began to teach me, as his friends were teaching him, the birth stories of these winged ones.

The male turkey gobbles not only to tempt the illusive hens to come to him, but to challenge the other males as well. If another big male hears the invitation, he may wander toward it hoping to waylay the hens, boldly greet the challenge, or he may acquiesce.

“Mom, once when we were on the hill calling, we ended up on the border between two different bands. They were gobbling back at us, thinking we were the other jakes, but they wouldn’t come any closer.”

I had listened as Matt told me how the male turkeys, from the time they are hatched, begin vying for the dominant position. They leave the brood to wander in a bachelor band, surviving not only howling blizzards and marauding coyotes, but the onslaughts of their own siblings. The young jakes—who have begun to sprout “beards”—wrestle, spur, and peck at one another until finally, by spring, a hierarchy has been established.

“Mom, did you know that it’s only the strongest tom who’s allowed to mate with the hens?” Matt asked as he browsed through a copy of Wyoming Wildlife. This did not surprise him—he knew the way of the bulls and the bucks. And he knew that despite this hierarchy, if the male turkey population grows too large the jakes begin molesting the nesting hens.

The Denver Post started putting news about the Littleton tragedy online almost immediately. “HIGH SCHOOL MASSACRE” read the first Internet headlines. Students described Harris and Klebold as “outcasts and loners.” I was reading these stories when loud gobbling calls penetrated the office walls of our log home. I heard the eager whine of our Border collie, then boots stomping on the wooden deck. I pulled myself away from the computer, dried my tears, and went to the back door.

“Mom, I got a turkey, Bruce got one too. You want to see them, don’t you?” he asked as we headed outside. “Bruce’s turkey was about 40 yards away, Mom, it was a hard shot.” Bruce looked humble, yet proud. Matt continued. “His bird was the dominant male, bigger than mine. Mine’s got an 8-inch beard, Mom!”

By now we had reached the old ‘74 ranch truck. The boys reached in the back of the pickup and lifted out their birds, holding them high in the air. “Let’s go fan ‘em out over by the oak trees. Where’s your camera, Matt?” All three boys were talking at once, each adding to the story.

“As soon as my bird realized the bigger turkey was hurt," Matt said, "he jumped on him and started clawing him. Then he stretched out his neck and stuck out his head to gobble—that’s when I shot him.” Matt was quiet for a moment. “They died fighting, Mom,” he said.

Images of the hillside scene flashed in my mind, intermingled with sound bite images from the morning news—children huddled under desks, the faces of parents frozen in fear, the twisted and desperate struggle of Harris and Klebold to fight an enemy they did not understand and had wrongly identified.

What lesson for Matt hid within the story of these turkeys? I struggled with Columbine’s hidden meaning, too broad in scope for a single human mind and heart. Later, after the boys had field dressed, then plucked and cleaned their birds, Matt told me, “You could read their whole history when you cleaned them, Mom. Mine had a big scar running along his side. He’d been in a lot of fights.”

I marinated Matt’s turkey overnight, then filled it with herb dressing and rubbed olive oil and spices into its flesh. I slow-roasted it, basting it during the day as bits of the Columbine story emerged on the news. “Diary shows gunmen mapping out massacre” read more headlines. I thought of Matt and his friends traversing the countryside as they mapped out the territories of the wildlife. There, in that remote Wyoming landscape, he was able to seek and find himself, to discover his place in the world.

We ate Matt’s turkey at a table set with my grandmother’s china. Sarah took the candles from the mantle and lit them while Mark took a picture of Matt seated at the table. That was not the first meat our son had brought home—we had eaten deer that he had hunted, and beef and pork that he had raised. Our prayers of thankfulness always honored the animals. That night, they also honored those who had died at Columbine.

These are stories of the land. They are the only parameters by which I know to seek my bearings. My heart aches for those who must navigate their way through life with technology alone. My heart aches for those who have stories to tell, but can find no one to listen, for those lost in a world so removed from nature that we have forgotten how to nurture. We must not wait for our young men to die fighting before we acknowledge the hidden scars they carry. We must not forget that there are lessons which only the land can teach us.

To read more stories about this tragey at Columbine High School, please go to Colorado Public Radio KCFR indepth news, BBC coverage, or 20th Century History articles .

A Spring Equinox Tribute to My Father, Loren E. Dunton

2009-03-20T09:02:00.007-06:00

Note: This essay first appeared in Kathleen Jo Ryan's photographic essay collection WRITING DOWN THE RIVER: INTO THE HEART OF THE GRAND CANYON (winner of the Willa Award, Northland Publishing, Flagstaff, AZ, 1997; foreward by Gretel Ehrlich).

“In the Canyon, you will hear the voices of our ancestors,” whispered my only sister from her home on the Big Island of Hawaii. “The River will be a good place to grieve.” Together we mourned our father’s death. Together, we cried.

Our father had died at high noon on the spring equinox – when the sun was at its highest directly overhead, and day and night were everywhere the same – a time of earthly balance. Then comet Hale-Bopp streaked across the sky, the earth moved between the moon and the sun, and our eclipsed world became a shadowed place.

Weeks later, I left my Wyoming ranch to be a crew assistant on a 13-day, 226-mile raft trip down the Colorado River. Envisioning hours of welcome solitude in which to grieve, I prepared myself to meet the twenty-three strangers with whom I would take this journey. My sister’s words echoed in my mind: You will hear the voices of our ancestors. How far back must one go, I wondered, before a father becomes an ancestor? Eagerly, I ventured into this elemental place of earth, air, fire – and water.

Our four rafts and one paddleboat eased into the water at Lees Ferry. The Canyon introduced herself to us slowly, layer by layer, as her walls eased themselves higher into the blue sky. But the River came at us all at once, with Badger and Soap Creek Rapids, then harrowing House Rock and the Roaring Twenties.

We hiked the North Canyon, which led to a quiet pool surrounded by feminine swirls of curvaceous rock. The guides, as at home in this environment as the canyon tree frogs living within splashing-distance, crawled the womb-like walls spread-eagled, their grips sure and strong. At Stone Creek, Sue, the other assistant, and I braved the arduous hike and were rewarded with waterfalls, tropical greenery, and black collared lizards.

With each rapid, the River batted her paws at us playfully, showing us just enough of her white-tipped claws to earn our respect. Those in the paddleboat raised their paddles overhead in celebratory salutes, then slapped the River affectionately – teasing her, tempting her. The guides eased their oars through the water, moving toward the Great Unknown, while Sue stretched out her long, lean muscled legs and smiled quietly.

Like the River, the days and nights rolled on. Sue and I searched Marble Canyon for California condors. Bighorn sheep dotted the lower cliffs. Mule deer watched us from shore by day, and at night slid silently through the exotic tamarisk. We went to sleep watching Yuma bats swoop through the air, their silhouettes dark against the sun-warmed cliffs. The bellow of a conch shell roused us at dawn, while the canyon wrens eased us into the morning.

One day two passengers, a brother and sister, along with family and friends, held a Yizkor ceremony in honor of their father, who had also just passed away. In a quiet circle, they said the Jewish Kaddish prayer. I stared up at the towering cliff faces and wished I could join the intimate service.

Instead, the words of the Lakota holy man, Black Elk, came to me. “You have noticed that the truth comes into this world with two faces. One face is sad with suffering, and the other laughs; but it is the same face, laughing or weeping. When people are already in despair, maybe the laughing face is better for them; and when they feel too good and are too sure of being safe, maybe the weeping face is better for them to see.” [1] Would I now, after the despair of my father’s death, finally see the face of laughter?

The River beckoned. Unable to resist her passionate nature, dangerous though it was, I turned away from the circle of prayer and eagerly began helping Sue and the men load the rafts.

Each ripple of white water brought a new adventure. Sockdolager Rapid bent Howie’s boat in half and delivered a one-two punch to bloody his nose. Sue and I held hands while leaping twenty feet into the turquoise waters of the Little Colorado. Blue herons greeted us from the waters of Bright Angel Creek, while the big River, stalking the shores, flirted shamelessly – lapping her tongue at our ankles, batting at the bows of our boats, rocking us to sleep at night.

Wilderness, I began to realize, belonged not only to the landscape of the earth, but to the landscape of the mind as well.

We hiked silently up into the ribs of Blacktail Canyon and saw the Great Unconformity where the Tapeats Sandstone and the Vishnu Schist joined – a geological wonder of one billion years of missing rock. I traced my fingers over the layers, transcending the centuries, and thought of how, as my father lay dying, I had tried to smooth the lines of pain from his anguished face. Nature made it seem so easy – this going from one generation to the next. Perhaps this barrier of death separating father and daughter was not carved in stone as I had imagined.

The River, eyeing Howie at Specter, tossed him from his raft into the swirling rapids, then impishly stole one of his flip-flops. The mishap broke a small bone in his shoulder, disabling him. He tied the remaining sandal to the bow of his boat and, one-armed like Major Powell, tipped his straw hat, acknowledging the River’s prowess.

Sue, who had rowed and paddled before but lacked Howie’s years of experience, took over for him at Deubendorff. He and I became her only riders and, with 95 miles left to go, she became the boatman.

Sue’s rowing was capable, in control, and remarkably calm. When the hot, dry winds blew in her face, I poured buckets of cold water over her head. We laughed, enjoying the camaraderie of the Canyon. She avoided most of the energy-sucking eddies, and faced the rapids of Tepeats, Fishtail, and Upset with skill and enthusiasm. I envied her proficiency – felt proud to be a new friend. Yet the question paramount in Sue’s mind, and everyone else’s, spurred us on like a tailwind. “With the River running at nearly 28,000 cubic feet per second, will Sue row Lava Falls?”

Her husband, one of the guides, knew the dangers intimately; he had seen the first woman die at Lava twenty years ago. Here, at one of the most difficult stretches of runnable whitewater in North America, the River bares her fangs. They say there are two kinds of boatmen: those who have flipped, and those who will. Many have been humbled by Lava’s ledge hole – a deep abyss of ravenous black water with waves bold enough to bury the burliest of boatmen.

After scouting the rapid from the hot, rocky shore, and quietly listening to the well-intentioned advice of the other guides, Sue made her decision. She would run it. A motorboat from another outfitter ran the rapid ahead of us, then took up a rescue position downstream.

Our raft was the last to go. The wind picked up, hotter than ever. The strong current carried us quickly out into the middle of the River, too far to the right. Sue rowed valiantly, pushing hard, every muscle straining as she tried to go left, where the smooth tongue could ease us past the gaping mouth and huge waves.

But the River had something else in mind. She dropped us into her ledge hole, folded the raft over the top of us, then snatched us to her – spitting the boat back into the air like a piece of gristle. She sucked us beneath the surface and, alone, I tumbled through the wet darkness, not knowing up from down. The water churned and frothed, as if salivating in anticipation. “Take a deep breath before you do Lava,” I had been warned.

Then, perhaps accidentally, the River brought Sue and me together. Our heads collided and we clutched at one another’s arms, all the while in the water’s dangerous embrace. Like a young lioness unaware of her own strength, Lava toyed with us. We surfaced, coughing and sputtering, only to be thrust under the waves again and again. We clung to each other, not daring to let go. Finally, the River turned us loose. Rising to the surface – amazed, elated, and grateful – we looked at each other, and grinned.

Lava’s own white-capped grin eased into a contented Cheshire cat smile of smooth water. Only then did we notice Howie safely upstream clinging to the bottom of the raft, and the motor boat downstream screaming toward us, lifeline dragging through the water.

By that night we were laughing, drinking Margaritas, eating steak, and Sue was, in everyone’s mind but her own, a heroine.

The last evening on the River a radiant moon shone down, the wind eased up, and the air turned balmy – a bare skin night full of promise. It was the eve of the summer solstice, when the sun sets in the northernmost corner of the sky, far from the celestial equator – when the night was as endless as the Canyon was grand.

I had expected the Canyon to be a hard and rocky place – abrupt, massive, and imposing. And so she was. I had not expected her to share with me her inner beauty: curvaceous streams, slick stone and green fern, waterfalls whispering in the shadows, pools glistening in quiet corners. The Canyon invited me into these places like a lover beckoning from afar. “Come,” she enticed, “swim in the passionate river currents of my lifeblood. Lift the callused skin of my ancient body and glimpse the tender places of my soul.”

This ancestral land of earth, air, fire, and water raised the twentieth century from my back and exposed layers of time, stacked one upon the other – Kaibab upon Toroweap upon Coconino. Yet her Great Unconformity freed me from the illusion of vertical time and space. My fingers caressed the ancient rock of the Vishnu Schist, and once again I touched my father’s face. And then, as I was taken back into the watery womb and thrust from it reborn, I heard my father’s voice, joyous now, urging me on.

[1] Black Elk Speaks by John G. Neihardt; Pocket Books, Nov.1973 edition, p.159-160; New York, NY.

Cataract Canyon and Roxanne Swentzell - Earthly Treasures

2009-03-11T21:28:00.008-06:00

Last year’s Westwater Canyon River Writing & Sculpting Journey for Women with guest Pueblo artist Roxanne Swentzell and her daughter, esteemed artist Rose B. Simpson, inspired poetry and sculpture. This year, some of the same women are returning. Others, new to the adventure, will experience it for the first time. This time, we'll spend six days in ancient Cataract Canyon in Canyonlands National Park.

What did we do each day? We journaled. We talked about story spirals. We sculpted with river clay. We sang in grottos and swam in whirlpools. We watched Big Horn sheep scatter across red rock. We watched Rose stomp a Flamenco dance in the sand to the impossibly horrible clapping rhythm of Page and Roxanne. We ate way too much delicious food cooked by amazing women guides.

This year, we get to do it all again. Amazing! Go to http://www.pagelambert.com/ to find out more. The following poem is formed of bits and pieces from all of us....

We hang onto little moments of our trip.
Touchstones that bring it back.
Water, sun, rock, sun, rock, water, and sand.
That afternoon at Black Rocks
when some of us played with our clay
and others of us swam nearby…
Warm emotional embraces felt
from every woman on the journey …
The river beckons…
It soothes my soul and makes me whole…
Rocks and twigs, already placed in my office…
Little clay pieces
I pick them up…
Eagle, shadow, red rock wall, soft chirps…
We Laugh at elephant jokes…
The ram, the eagle, the otter…
The canyon walls, the river, the clay, the shared words…
Black rocks fold into themselves…
Morning shadows play with the curves and hollows
of the long sinewy bones of rock…
Breath spirals down, gentlyfloating with the rhythm of the river.

© Westwater River Women, 2008

Watch Roxanne sculpting in the video "Living Portraits: New Mexico Artists & Writers"

Read Rose B. Simpson's poems and see her paintings.

Visit the "Mothers and Daughters: Stories in Clay" Heard Museum Exhibit with Rose Simpson and Roxanne Swentzell

Sign Up or Get Details on the 2009 River Writing & Sculpting Journey for Women