By LARRY JOSEPH CALLOWAY

Anasazi,

Anasazi,            

tucked up in clefts in the cliffs

 growing strict fields of corn and beans

 sinking deeper and deeper in earth

 up to your hips in Gods. . . .

–Gary Snyder

They are long gone, of course, eight centuries gone, but I always think they still own those crooked canyons and sunny alcoves where they built in sandstone and wrote on walls and signed their strange writs with hand prints. After the summer heat we drove to the Colorado Plateau looking for the goners, the absentee owners. We walked their intermittent ways in the sun and sat and read or talked by the lantern in the moon. Like good journalists and good tourists we came back with stories and pictures. There was a house on fire.

As if something still raged. As if it were telling us something.

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There was a strange grey stone shaped and lined like a size medium Indian moccasin, right foot, the foot you extend first in yoga, Buddha foot, scout foot. We (my traveling partner Pat and I) first saw it on the six-mile walk up the shore below Todos Santos in south Baja California. It had been tossed high on the otherwise clean dry sand by the explosive surf. We kept walking in the cool wind – it was April – entertained by heavy grey pelicans gliding impossibly just inches above the sand like hovercraft and by hermit crabs of all sizes flashing to their safe houses. We ate nachos and drank margaritas and watched the surfers from a table at the gringo-owned Los Cerritos Surf and Beach Club (the club is private, the beach is public). On the way home, there it was again, the unlikely Buddha foot. We took it, packed it, flew it a thousand miles. It rests now on the right outside my door as if I have a one-foot guest who knows the Way. (more…)

The cool driver – he had dreadlocks – kept the radio on reggae, which dropped like bricks out of the speakers wired along the rusted yellow Blue Bird carrying us north from the birder-supported village of Crooked Tree, Belize. Suddenly the prime minister was on live, assuring the nation that he would not cave in to the “politicians” calling for his resignation and that the teachers better not strike. (more…)

I have driven about 3,000 U.S. 285 miles between Santa Fe and my new place in the upper San Luis Valley in 18 months, during which I have often meditated upon . . . Española.

Artistic community. Multicultural center. Literary scene. Intended burial place of Christopher Columbus. (more…)