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January 2014

Notes from the desert, Thursday:

The view from the porch, looking out to the Rincons, where my novel ''The Wood Wife'' was set.

"The sky was as full of motion and change as the desert beneath it was monotonous and still, and there was so much sky, more than at sea, more than anywhere else in the world. The plain was there, under one's feet, but what one saw when one looked about was that brilliant blue world of stinging air and moving cloud. Even the mountains were mere ant-hills under it. Elsewhere the sky is the roof of the world; but here the earth was the floor of the sky. The landscape one longed for when one was away, the thing all about one, the world one actually lived in, was the sky, the sky!"
  -  Willa Cather

The sky, the sky.

Benjamine Aliere Sanez's poem ''To Desert'' written on the wall of the Main House kitchenTo the Desert
by Benjamin Alire Sáenz

I came to you one rainless August night.
You taught me how to live without the rain.
You are thirst and thirst is all I know.
You are sand, wind, sun, and burning sky,
The hottest blue. You blow a breeze and brand
Your breath into my mouth. You reach—then bend
Your force, to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
You wrap your name tight around my ribs
And keep me warm. I was born for you.
Above, below, by you, by you surrounded.
I wake to you at dawn. Never break your
Knot. Reach, rise, blow, Sálvame, mi dios,
Trágame, mi tierra. Salva, traga, Break me,
I am bread. I will be the water for your thirst.


I love Saenz's poem because I also moved to the desert on a hot August night, in 1990, and the land did indeed teach me how "to live without the rain," breaking me open and fashioning my life, work, art, and spirit anew. I love the poem so much that I wrote on the kitchen wall here at Endicott West, surrounded by my favorite desert trees, the ghostly white sycamores....

Desert sycamore tree murals in the Main House kitchenThe mural paintings in the Main House kitchen, and Saenz's poem hand-written in gold ink.

EWest kitchenEvening in the kitchen, looking out to horse corrals and mountains. So many fine conversations here....

Charles Vess & Charles de Lint at E-WestCharles Vess and Charles de Lint at the same table some years ago, signing pages for....was it "Medicine Road"?

Common Room

The Common Room in the Main HouseThe Common Room in the Main House, and color, color, everywhere. The clear desert light seems to demand it.

Oliver & Toby, E-West, 2005My beloved cat Oliver (the big tiger-striped boy) on the Common Room couch, with Emma Bull and Will Shetterly's cat Toby, 2005. Oliver lived to be an old man of 20, and is buried on the ranch.

The CasitaThe beehive fireplace in the Casita (one of the Retreat's guest spaces), on a cool desert evening.

The Casita porch, surrounded by a walled gardenEvening light on the Casita's back porch.

Desert sycamore tree mural in the Bunk House The desert sycamore tree in E-West's Bunk House (another guest space), where I live when I'm here.

Desert lightAbove, morning light beside my bed. Below, sunset is reflected on the Rincon Mountains to the east.

''I go into the desert not only to evade the clamor and confusion of this country's cultural apparatus but also to confront, immediately and directly if it’s possible, the bare bones of existence, the elemental and fundamental, the bedrock which sustains us. I want to be able to look at and into a juniper tree, a piece of quartz, a vulture, a spider, and see it as it is in itself, devoid of all humanly ascribed qualities, anti-Kantian, even the categories of scientific description. To meet God or Medusa face to face, even if it means risking everything human in myself. I dream of a hard and brutal mysticism in which the naked self merges with a nonhuman world and yet somehow survives still intact, individual, separate. Paradox and bedrock.''  - Edward Abbey (Desert Solitaire)

P1080803Photo credits: Some of the interior pictures come from Long Realty (shot before packing began), and the rest are mine.


Notes from the desert, Wednesday:

Javelina

Javelina seem to be the patron animals here at Endicott West this week, as they've been coming around quite regularly -- particularly out at the Bunk House, where I'm sleeping, where they snuffle around both day and night and prowl right through my dreams.

Javelina

During one of the times when Howard was here in Tucson he remarked that javelina, despite their bristly bulk, looked to him like ballet dancers en pointe as they crossed the desert on oddly daintly little feet. This sparked the following little drawing by me, followed by a charming poetic ditty by Howard, from which these words are drawn....

Dancing Javelina

JavelinaSince the local javelina herd has an uncanny knack of appearing only when my camera is not nearby, the photographs above come from the Tucson Weekly site (photographers uncredited).


The talismans I hold...

Endicott West

"We need to return to learning about the land by being on the land, or better, by being in the thick of it. That is the best way we can stay in touch with the fates of its creatures, its indigenous cultures, its earthbound wisdom. That is the best way we can be in touch with ourselves."  - Gary Paul Nabhan (The Geography of Childhood)

Endicott West

"I heard a young city boy ask an elderly Papago woman if, lacking a harvesting pole, one could ever collect fruit off the tall cacti by throwing rocks at the tops to knock the fruit down.

"'No!' Marquita replied with a strain of horror in her voice. 'The saguaros -- they are Indians too. You don't ever throw anything at them. If you hit them on the head with rocks you could kill them. You don't ever stick anything sharp into their skin either, or they will just dry up and die. You don't do anything to hurt them. They are Indians."  - Gary Paul Nabhan (The Desert Smells Like Rain)

Endicott West

Endicott West

Endicott West

"We know so very little about this strange planet we live on, this haunted world where all answers lead only to more mystery.”  - Edward Abbey (Desert Solitaire)

Wind chimes in the mesquite tree

Endicott West

"Experience is the talisman I hold for courage. It is the desert that persuades me toward love, to step outside and defy custom one more time."  - Terry Tempest Williams (Desert Quartet)

Endicott West


Tunes for a Monday Morning

This morning: music from the American south-west, in a range of musical moods.

First, two pieces for Native American flute by the brilliant Ute/Navajo flautist and composer R. Carlos Nakai, who lives here in Tucson. Above, "Feather, Stone, and Light," performed by Nakai with his long-time collaborators William Clipman and William Easton, at the Musical Instrument Museum in Phoenix. Below, a solo improvisation on the Native American flute, at the same performance.

Next:

The wonderful Mexican-American singer/songwriter Trish Hinojosa performing "Donde Voy," backed up by Marvin Dykhuis. Hinojosa hails from San Antonio, but performs here in Tucson quite a bit.

And last:

Tucson's own Calexico, performing "Crystal Frontier," their classic song about the Arizona/Mexico border.