Garden of Eden

There are places here so beautiful and hard to reach — I think that goes together — that they don’t seem of this earth. Or rather, what we’ve become used to thinking of as home is just the palest imitation of the real thing.
To me, the mountain meadows are the most sublime. There are forest [...]

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This is the way for me to live. If every day could be like this one, I’d move through life so smoothly that I’d never leave a wake.
When I woke up, it was almost dark! What on earth could be the matter? And then I groggily perceived that it was raining, which it almost never [...]

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It was just one of those cranked-up, crazy days.
My wife the pianist had to go rehearse with a classical singer at 11:00, which meant I had a free slot to practice for the upcoming Los Changos del Mar gigs. She doesn’t mind if I practice while she’s here, which is kind of miraculous, but I [...]

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Quite the remarkable day…
This morning, with very little planning or forethought, we decided to drive up to the BLM’s Wild Rivers Recreation Area today and hike to La Junta Point, where the Red River and the Rio Grande come together in the gorge. Wild Rivers is a place unto itself: in the northern part of [...]

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No one will believe this happened because of Twitter, but it did.
I’ve only been using the service for a month. But I was happy and surprised to discover that two Taos residents, a frequent commenter on this site and a realtor friend of mine (neither of whom is remotely described by those terms), were also [...]

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This is turning out to be one of the weirder natural things I’ve observed in my life, and that’s saying something.
In fact, it’s almost as bizarre as the infamous “mouse rattle.” That one involved the dessicated corpse of a mouse with tiny little bones rattling inside a stiff, leathery skin. I have photos but have [...]

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Something remarkable just happened.
My wife has been bugging me to come downtown with her, get a latte at the World Cup, and “fantasize” about housing, so that’s what I did today, deadlines be damned. The idea (suggested by our friendly neighborhood Jungian analyst in Zurich) was to take any housing discussion to a neutral location [...]

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You can never have too many apricots, right?
My wife would argue the point, but that’s only because I still have at least four pies’ worth clogging up the freezer. [Go here for a nice shot of a blooming apricot tree.] The photo below shows where we often sit outside, in between blizzards: the apricot tree [...]

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The project manager for the “Miranda Canyon Preserve” (which doesn’t “preserve” a damn thing) just telephoned me to complain about inaccuracies and misconceptions in my earlier post. I’m afraid I immediately became extremely emotional and hung up on him. [Sigh...]
That’s all right, though.
Number one, I’m delighted that he found my blog by googling. (Apparently [...]

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I took another hike, and this is what I found:
The photo below gives you some idea of the area of the so-called “Miranda Canyon Preserve,” actually a giant real estate development literally larger than the town of Taos (!) that may yet come to pass. Imagine all that land chopped up into 150 very pricey [...]

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Now here is a great idea:
Artists and architects are buying foreclosed homes in Detroit for as little as $100. In St. Louis, artists are moving into vacant retail spaces in a shopping mall, turning stores that stood empty for more than a year into studios and event spaces for rents of $100 a month. Artspace [...]

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