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Never for Sale: Listening (or Not) to the Language of the Land

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I have just returned from visiting my son and daughter in Wyoming and spending time with my four granddaughters. This was the first visit in over twenty years without my husband John. I am only now venturing into the hazy world of writing about his death. Sharing this article (previously published in the magazine Terralingua ) seems like a good way to tiptoe into his memory, while also honoring the land our family loves so much. The year is 2015. John and I are driving down an unfurling ribbon of highway en route to the Black Hills of Wyoming and the small town of Sundance, population 1222. I’m doing battle with the State’s Department of Transportation, which has decreed to realign a major state highway through the pristine heart of the ranchland where my children were reared. I was a mere caretaker of my children compared to the land that raised them. My daughter ran up and down deer paths. My son explored high ridges and deep gullies. They gathered sheep off the hayfield before night...
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With Love, from Grandpa Loren

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On the Vernal Equinox in 1905, thirty-two years after Jules Verne wrote Around the World in 80 Days, the 77-year-old French writer would die. He is revered even now as the Father of Science Fiction. On the Vernal Equinox in 1997, my own father Loren Dunton, known as the Father of Financial Planning, would die from a blood thinner expected to save him, but which caused a massive brain hemorrage that would kill him. Both men lived remarkable lives, and today I celebrate their memories. When my father was 77, he sent my son a copy of Jules Verne’s Classic Science Fiction. “To Matt,” he inscribed, “with love from Grandpa Loren, San Francisco.” At the time, I wondered why my father would be sending our son, who was only nine, a 511-page book. At first the gift seemed thoughtless, but then, as I wrote an essay about it for my memoir In Search of Kinship , I grew to understand the reason. This story may already be familiar to some of you. “Sixty-five years and a thousand miles separate...
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Field to Fork: That's How Fresh Our Words Must Taste

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A few weeks ago, in New Mexico, John and I visited Los Poblano's, a historic inn and organic farm in Albuquerque. Nestled in the heart of the Rio Grande Valley, with the Sandia Mountains in the background, we drove through a shaded alleyway of ancient cottonwoods surrounded by 25-acres of fragrant lavender fields. A red Farmall tractor greeted us on the way to the restaurant, reminding us that our dinner at Campo's would be a "field to fork" experience, as much about feeding the soul as filling the stomach. Here is John, with the Sandias on the horizon behind him. The farm has been distilling botanicals for a few decades, which I learned while browsing the featured cocktails on the menu. John indulged in a glass of Hervé Villemade Pinot Noir/Gamay, Cheverny, from the Loire Valley region of France, while I   indulged in a Lavender Gin cocktail with Crème de Violette, lemon, sparkling wine and LP lavender syrup that claimed to capture the essence of the Rio Grande Valle...
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Riding the Tiger with Ellen McLaughlin

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"When rehearsals for King Lear started," friend, actor and playwright Ellen McLaughlin told us our first night on the river, "Just ride the tiger. That's what my director told me."   Ellen had been starring in King Lear as King Lear, a female actor portraying one of Shakespeare's most demanding and tragic male characters. The director didn't tell Ellen to hire a voice coach and learn to speak like a man, or to dress like a man (which Ellen wouldn't have done anyway). She told Ellen to ride the tiger.   The show opened and closed to packed audiences and critical acclaim. A day and a half after Ellen's final exhilarating performance, and after a brief reunion with her husband who had driven two thousand miles to celebrate their anniversary, I whisked her away for an all-women, 6-day rafting trip on Utah's Green River.      Our trip leader Brenda had been with me for nearly all of my river writing journeys over the last twenty-six years. She app...
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Sabbaticals: Resting the Landscape of the Heart

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Cultures and communities that still live close to the land as our ancestors once did - farmers and ranchers, tribal people, rural neighbors - all know the wisdom of allowing the land to lie fallow. Even the neighborhood horse co-op that I belong to rotates our herd of horses from one mountain pasture to the next during the growing season. "Leave enough biomass  above the ground,"  traditional wisdom advises, "so that the sun may feed the roots  below the ground. " The golden grasses are dormant now - resting and recouping. The horses rest, too, conserving their energy. During a recent spell of subfreezing temperatures, each morning the herd stood quietly facing the sun, as if their bodies were living, breathing solar panels soaking in the warm rays.  Yet I often grind away at each day, sometimes not lifting my eyes long enough to feel the sun on my face, let alone rest long enough to nourish the roots that sustain me. Perhaps I need a sabbatical.  The archaic wo...
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Summer Solstice

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Deborah O'Connor is a gifted astrologer and, on the near eve of my birthday, I find her latest message especially insightful and wise. I hope you do, as well. The photo of the Indian Paintbrush I took on the edge of the canyon near our mountain home several years ago. I have always cherished my June birthdays, and this one seems even more impactful. Midsummer is a poignant time. Light itself moves through us and into our world with more intensity than any other day of the year. On this bright and light-filled day, we recognize that, like the sun that has been expanding itself more and more and more for six months now, we have been working—body and soul—to energize our lives. But today is a turning point, literally.  Summer Solstice begins when the Sun moves into heart-aware Cancer. This is a day when Time itself pauses to see the way forward. Since the sun began to gain light and strength at Winter Solstice six months ago, we've driven ourselves as we felt its energy fillin...
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Wrap Your Heart Around the World

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Photo by Time Magazine In 1964, the Beatles walked down the steps of a Pan Am Boeing 707 and stepped onto American soil at New York's Kennedy Airport. A few months later, my parents drove our family of four across the United States from Colorado to the World’s Fair in New York City. From there, we drove to Montreal, sold our car, and sailed on the cold waters of the Atlantic down the St. Lawrence Seaway on a steamship bound for England. We didn’t step back on American soil until 1965—one year, 27 countries, and one London Beatles concert later.   The world would never be the same—for our family, for the Beatles, for the teenage girls who swooned over John, Paul, George, and Ringo as girls had swooned over Elvis and James Dean. Those times now seem deceptively innocent, the girls with their penny loafers and ponytails, the half-grown boys with their bobbed bangs singing, S he's in love with me, and I feel fine ... She's so glad, she's telling all the world....  Ukraine i...
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If Only the Moon Would Still the Tides

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When John took this photo of my favorite knoll at the ranch in Wyoming, eight years had already passed since I'd climbed to her barren top and peered down at the redtail hawk soaring beneath. Yet the stories I continue to tell about this land create an ongoing dialogue that pulses through everything new. During the last half of 2021, I shrugged off guilt as each monthly blog post went unwritten, in part because new chapters of the novel on which I was working continued to unfold. The writing experience had become less about interpreting the world, and more about listening.  Immersed each morning in the novel, I listened to the Colorado wind blowing through the ponderosas outside my window and to the woman whose story I was telling. When Monique rested her hand on the back of her grandfather's gray horse, I felt the horse's warmth beneath my own.* When Monique slid onto Nishiime's back and draped her bare legs around his ribs, urging him along the lakeshore and into its ...
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