Dawn at Taos

Watercolor, 8 x 11

Fabriano Artistico 300# paper

From John Nichols' The Sky's the Limit

Every morning for thousands and millions of years, the  sun "comes up," over the holy mountain of the Taos Pueblo, inhabited by Americans for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years.

On the Mesa west of town, the sky gradually lightens, silhouetting the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. In between is the Rio Grand gorge, dropping hundreds of feet through lava rock in a rift valley.


The mountain is majestic because it arises so abruptly from the mesa--Spanish for table --land, but it majestic for many other reasons. It is off limits to all but the prehistoric Taos Indians who live in their pueblo and the iconic multi-storied adobe great house that was typical of many pueblos before the Spanish intruded 500 years ago, bringing "civilization," Catholicism and disease with them.

But Taos has survived them, and will survive the late-arriving gringos as well. This is a people and land of contrasts and invaders and beauty. The beauty will remain. All others are temporary and short-lived.

Note: the current photo at the top of my blog is one sunset view from that mesa.

When I think of Taos, I think of my 18-year-old Dad, who wanted to join the art colony here in the 1930s, after he'd lost his leg trying to jump a freight in Tucumcari inthe Depression. I think of the cold, clear northern New Mexico air, the smell of pinon smoke, the cottonwoods, the artists, the light that draws artists, and the sacred mountain that towers over town and pueblo at dawn, at sunset and in between, season after season.

Seeing geology

On the highway north from Santa Fe, on the east are the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, the tail end of the Rocky Mountain chain. To the west are the Jemez Mountains, a volcanic caldera and also the location of another human caldera, Los Alamos, home of the atomic bomb. Ahead of you along the Rio Grande is Espanola, Taos, and "del norte, much of northern New Mexico.

As a kid, I remember the first time we came to Espanola to visit my uncle Mike who taught there. We came upon the remnants of a great prehistoric inland sea. Eroded sand, rocks and formations of what had been mud stretched out across the landscapes like bleached skeletons of long dead dinosaurs.

Beyond Pojoaque and before you enter Espanola, you can turn east on a state highway that heads up through a Cottonwood-cloaked valley toward Santuario de Chimayo's shrine and holy dirt, and even higher on the "High Road to Taos" to Susan's favorite town, Truchas, at 8,000+ feet at the base of the 13,000 foot Truchas peaks, my favorite  New Mexico mountains.

On the way to Chimayo' you pass this "hoodoo" for lack of a better term, part of the bleached, eroded landscape that reminds me of prehistoric creatures. I've tried to paint it several times, but I get too caught up in being literal, and somehow it loses its power.

This view is looking northwest, back  toward Espanola in the valley below. I was going to make this a photo at the top of my blog later, but after Alan Bates of Tulsa, fellow blogger (Yogi's Den), listed on my blog sidebar and fellow New Mexican, responded to a facebook post about Espanola, it got me to thinking. This country makes you want to tell stories.

Where you can see

Watercolor, 5 x 7

Fabriano Artistico 300# paper

Willa Cather wrote that in New Mexico, the earth is the floor of the sky.

It is. Here you can "see" geology, strata in the earth and in the sky and in yourself...where the intensity of light immerses you and the land and sky.

Traveling with ghosts

The map of Paul Theroux's travels on ghost trains...if you can't go there yourself, the book is the next best thing for freeing the spirit after a long winter, or even just being cooped up by life.

Reading Paul Theroux's Ghost Train to the Eastern star, on the tracks of his Great Railway Bazaar from 33 years ago, from England across the continent and back on the trans-Siberian Railway.

As a fellow traveler in time at least, here are some things I've underlined so far:

"And there are dreams, the dream of a foreign land that I enjoy at home, staring east into space at imagined temples, crodwed bazaars....

"Being invisible--the usual condition of the older traveler--is much more useful than being obvious. You see more, you are ignored. Such a traveled isn't in a hurry, which is why you might mistake him for a bum.

"Hating schedules, depending on chance encounters...
"Ghosts have all the time in the world...
"It is almsot impossible to return to an early scene in your traveling life and not feel like a specter."

"Improvising my trip, rubbing against the world...."

"Memory is a ghost train too."

"Travel also holds the magical possiblity of reinvention; that you might find a place you love, to begin a new life and never go home."

"The decision to return to any early scene in your life is dangerous but irresitbile...In most cases it is like meeting an old lover years later and hardly recognizing the object of desire...."

"Writers sometimes have to leave home."

"Nothing is more suitable to a significant departure than bad weather."  "...writing weather."

More ghosts later...

Sunset

Watercolor--7" x 9"

300# Fabriano artistico paper

The beginning of March, the passing of February. The pages of February included this, "Every now and then something that appeared to be dead comes gradually  to life. Often it dies again."--Poet Laureat Donald Hall, in Unpacking the Boxes. More than the sun, every day I realize this. This painting came when I thought of the sun, and New Mexico writer John Nichols--Milagro Bean Field War, and his stunning photographs of the mesa near Taos and writing in The Sky's The Limit, an environmental book, of which I have a fist edition..

The pages of March look  to the future and the past....What happened to present tense?

Paul Theroux in Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, trying to retrace his steps from 33 years ago in the Great Railway Bazaar, and George Friedman, a futurist in The Next 100 Years. Theroux discovers ghosts, as we all do when we retrace steps, even journeying into the present. He does what I'd like to...travel on trains and write. Friedman melds 20th Century History with geopolitics and fascinating possibilities. Good reading, even with ghosts.