As I look around this big room, I see many people, friends, acquaintances and strangers who all have something to say that I would like to hear… But since I am honored by the New Mexico Women in the Arts with the responsibility of speaking to you tonight, I want to draw our attention to the two young women, seniors at our high schools this winter, who will receive the scholarships to which all of you have contributed.
Blog Posts about New Mexico
Dreaming The Dream of Modern Life
They are taking our train away, eliminating Colorado and New Mexico from the line that has stopped at Lamy, New Mexico since 1887; there is some problem with the tracks in Kansas, no one wants to pay for their repair, and so in two years my beloved Southwestern Chief may be southwestern no more, routed down through Texas, leaving us stranded.
Ten Favorites: The Fire Next Time
Ten Favorites: A Town Made For Women
When people ask me why I moved to Santa Fe twenty years ago, I answer according to my mood: the mountains, the sky, the light—all familiar answers that most of us offer, particularly if we are artists for whom such attributes are especially important.
It Takes Years
It take years, decades, even, for me to begin to know a place, and usually that’s just when I’m packing to leave. It’s easy to confuse the blindness that can come with familiarity with boredom; it’s easy to confuse the geographical solution—moving somewhere new, to escape old problems—as the true solution it never is. My eye, grown blind to one set of trees and shadows, soon grows blind to the next set.
A Town Made For Women
When people ask me why I moved to Santa Fe twenty years ago, I answer according to my mood: the mountains, the sky, the light—all familiar answers that most of us offer, particularly if we are artists for whom such attributes are especially important.
Chicken Picking and Flag Flying
As the snows begin to recede here in the southern Rockies, the descansos by the sides of our roads come back into view. These are shrines created by families who have lost someone in a car wreck at that spot.
The Floating World
I’ve lived in the mountains for a long time, gotten the knack of it. Every morning down the hill by eight to catch a ride, if I’m lucky, with some guy going to work in Santa Fe. Always a young guy alone in a beat-up car, maybe driving in for breakfast from the campground.
Reading The Greeks, Plato Continued
Fifteen years ago, when I first encountered Plato’s teachings at St. John’s College here, I railed against them. My mother used to call this, “Kicking against the pricks,” no pun intended.
Today I’m beginning to realize that this curriculum, based on the Great Books, a system devised in the 1940’s to encompass the whole of a gentleman’s essential library, reveals the base-the stones-on which we all stand.
The Stones We Stand On: Reading The Greeks
I’m trying, with a good deal of anxiety, to put together what I know and believe with the suppositions and proofs of the ancient Greek philosophers. They use a language and a way of thinking, totally abstract—almost—that is as foreign to me as the abstruse calculations each member of my class must write, from memory, on the blackboard.