Beached
I feel like a beached whale, and I’m not referring to the medieval tightness of my wetsuit or the Christmas cookies I’ve been housing like oxygen. I’m referring to being beached – literally – like a whale. Unable to move. Immobilized. Stuck. I’m in Hawaii on the island of Oahu, traveling alone in paradise in […]
The Breath of a River
This is how I found my way back. We are at the open doors of a shed on the ramshackle property I’ve rented in a long, narrow, rock-walled side valley near Durango, Colorado. Harold’s bald head has sweat all over it and his dark, bushy moustache (still holding pizza bits from his airport lunch two […]
The Great Man
UCLA Professor Emeritus Lorenzo Sifuentes, recently turned 80, adjusted his glasses: his new black “computer” glasses. Although his habit for over 50 years had been to compose his poems in pencil on yellow legal pads, it was time for his habits to change. A month after his wife Margo’s death he sent his son Marcus […]
Thom Chacon: Storytelling Between Strings & Streams
There’s a quiet power in Thom Chacon’s music—an honest simplicity that leaks through the cracks of metaphor and stays long after the last chord. In Durango, he’s more than just a singer-songwriter; he’s become a local troubadour whose stories feel like essential conversations. Chacon divides his life between two rhythms: the steady cast of a […]
When the Curtain First Rose
In 1972, a vast stretch of orange nylon billowed across the Colorado sky. Suspended high in Rifle Gap between two rugged cliffs, Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s Valley Curtain lasted just 28 hours before strong winds forced it down. Yet, in that brief moment, it left an impression that would endure for decades — not only on […]
FEAR THE ART: Do Artists Pose a Threat to Government?
Tyrannical regimes are infamous for the suppression of civil and human rights. Dictatorships scrupulously control the populace and keep a tight grip on power through coercion and the removal of liberty, mainly the ability of its people to opine or express disagreement with the government or its leaders. Freedom of thought and the freedom to […]