Spirit

One Sunday Morning and the Great Eye of God [Edited]

by John Hamilton Farr on May 27, 2012 · 10 comments

in Spirit

[The safer course is silence, right?—so I've no reason to lie. -JHF] A week ago today, on the morning of the day of the annular solar eclipse, a powerful Technicolor dream woke me up with a start. It was so vivid, so unusual, and so startling, that I knew I’d had a vision. (Call it [...]

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Coyote Toilet

by John Hamilton Farr on January 30, 2012 · 13 comments

in Best o' the Blog, Spirit

“Quiet!” she hushed, raising an index finger to her lips and cocking her head. She meant it, so I shut up. Seconds passed. “What is it?” I asked softly. “Like something outside, a wild animal, coyotes howling or something,” she replied, still searching for a match. Personally, I didn’t wonder. It’s hard to hear through [...]

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Clear Skies

by John Hamilton Farr on October 20, 2011 · 5 comments

in Best o' the Blog, Spirit

What a great day. It’s like someone flipped a switch! First I had my own breakthrough. All my life I’ve been moping around waiting for success, for some external “thing” to validate my existence. Money? Reputation? A certain lifestyle? But I was always thwarted by my family, where I lived, or maybe just the weather. [...]

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Taos Torture and the Soul of Man [Revised]

by John Hamilton Farr on July 8, 2011 · 14 comments

in Best o' the Blog, Spirit

Taos is a ridiculous place to live. Let me count the ways. Better yet, let me ride them into Hell and come back scorched. Oh right, we did that already. I feel almost fine now, but don’t get in my way unless you’re five feet and a half, get misty-eyed about your Iowa roots, and [...]

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On the Trail of Ruthless Abandon

by John Hamilton Farr on June 1, 2011 · 14 comments

in Spirit

Okay, this is radical. For me, anyway. For some reason I chose to be born into a family that neither trusted nor encouraged creativity and ran like hell from passion. The world was a raggedy, hurtful, hell of a place where your only hope of living a decent life was fitting in and earning some [...]

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Compassion

by John Hamilton Farr on May 5, 2011 · 1 comment

in Spirit

No, I’m neither Catholic nor Christian. But I woke up thinking of La Guadalupana, and believe me, she’s very appropriate for this day. More to come…

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Doing It All Wrong

by John Hamilton Farr on March 13, 2011 · 2 comments

in Spirit

If only my mother hadn’t been insane. If only my father had bounced me on his knee instead of dropping empty vodka bottles on my head. Think of all the time I might have saved! Yesterday I had the whole day to myself, intending to write, but oozed into a slide. The joy was gone [...]

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Nature Doesn’t Give a Damn

by John Hamilton Farr on January 9, 2011 · 8 comments

in Spirit

Indeed not! And so little understood by most of us. Northern New Mexico is one good place to feel the truth of this, but I chose photos from the San Luis Valley of southern Colorado for this post because most pictures I have of Taos are far too “pretty.” By no stretch of anyone’s imagination [...]

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Strange Calm

by John Hamilton Farr on November 10, 2010 · 13 comments

in Spirit

This afternoon I saved the parsley. Eleven degrees tonight (-12 °C), so they say. Now the two terra cotta planters sit on both sides of a big geranium in a Mexican pot, in a little spot inside the doorway to the kitchen that gets sunlight in the afternoon. The geranium lost all its leaves a [...]

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Sixth Street Cure

by John Hamilton Farr on August 7, 2010 · 6 comments

in Spirit, Teresa

Grief does strange things to a man. But why is my dying sister so wise? For weeks now I’ve been only semi-functional, a terrible handicap since I normally only manage about 50% anyway. As soon as I hit Austin, I stopped at the H.E.B. to buy some groceries. A sack of key limes from Mexico [...]

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