"I have no news, nothing happens here but miracles," wrote Mabel Dodge Luhan to a friend out East that envisaged the worst for the wealthy New York socialite and arts patron whom had relocated to land abutting the Taos Pueblo reservation with no running water, no electricity, and not much more than chamisa (sagebrush) and coarse earth for miles and miles around.
Yet I haven't seen sunsets like this since I was on Koh Jum, Thailand this December, where the pinks are so tender, colors bounce off clouds into a fourth dimension, and the rays of shadow-rain spur off like spokes of a wheel in a boundless sky. I don't know if place matters for inspiration. But Taos seems to be a magnet for inspired people. On an evening run, I past street signs like W. Camino Abajo de la Loma (so much more romantic in Spanish, it means Road Beneath the Mountain). I sit here this moment in an Internet cafe with a small trickling fountain over my shoulder on 705 Felicidad Lane (which of course means Happiness Lane).
"We can cultivate and maintain this sense of wonder, what in Sanskit is called vismayo, 'joy-filled amazement' or 'the state of surprise and wonder'," writes Jeff Davis. That's the essence of The Yoga of Writing workshop I'm in this week at the Taos Summers Writers Conference. (I highly recommend instructor Jeff Davis' book, The Journey from the Center to the Page, which is just out in paperback.)
Quotes and poems I've heard this week that clue us in to wonder. I threw in one I wrote this week.
It takes a lifetime to learn to be young. - Pablo Picasso
Genius is the ability to retreive childhood at will. - French poet Charles Baudelaire
Art is the most concrete representation of our most subtle feelings. - late Taos artist Agnes Martin
In a way, poetry is an attempt to break through the diversity of reality into a zone where the simplest things are again as fresh as if they were being seen by a child. - Czeslaw Milosz, Nobel Prize winner in literature (readings of some poems here)
They call all experience of the senses mystic
when the experience is considered.
So an apple becomes mystic when I taste in it
the summer and the snows, the wild welter of earth
and the insistence of the sun.
All of which things I can surely taste in a good apple.
Though some apples taste preponderantly of water, wet and sour
and some of too much sun, brackish sweet
like lagoon-water, that has been too much sunned.
If I say I taste these things in an apple,
I am called mystic, which means a liar.
The only way to eat an apple is to hog it down like a pig
and taste nothing
that is real.
But if I eat an apple, I like to eat it with all my senses awake.
Hogging it down like a pig I call the feeding of corpses.
Azure by Evelyn Rodriguez
smooth like turquoise stone, cold
and luscious to touch like limone
gelato slinking down your throat
exotic like the Azores or the Mediterranean Sea
bleached white cottages facing the Aegean
blue blending into blue horizon
into a dive off a cliff in Acapulco
piercing, swift then silent, still, still
waves lapping, lapping
in rhythm to your heart's
ram-pa-pum ram-pa-pum ram-pa-pum
p.s. You'll have to wait until till at least next week to get my two cents on anything resembling business applications of wonder and poetry and artist's colonies.
Credits: St. Francis de Asis Flicker photo by palisade14 | Taos Pueblo Flickr photo by laNDN
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