Flipflop joy

I bought these flipflops 18 years ago, before tenting my way around the Southwest for most of a summer, rightly predicting I'd encounter every manner of showers except a clean ones. I've brought them with me to Santa Fe for the third time now as I attend the Glen Workshop, held on the lovely campus of St. John's College. You got it: dorm showers. But the trip here is in its way like that glorious summer of wanderlust--a sustained dose of wild beauty, although in more ways than open road and dramatic landscapes. In this gathering, I'm saturated daily with the beauty and fire of art and words and music and ideas and community, as well as a landscape that particularly ignites my soul. Had I belief in previous incarnations, I am certain I must have been a desert rat. I am, again, so happy to be here.



The Big Dipper is hanging outside my balcony of my dorm room and down below, the lights of Santa Fe flicker against a backdrop of rolling mountains. Cricket chirps and distant bursts of laughter float up from somewhere on campus. Tomorrow morning, after trying to wrestle sleep from an overstimulated brain and lumpy pillow, I'll return to my drawing workshop with renowned artist, Barry Moser, and trace the human form, miraculous in its form and functionality, and be grateful I was granted an opposable thumb. It would be much less appealing to have to draw with claws. And I don't think my flipflops would fit.