As long as you are there

Adrienne Rich writes: "Living in the earth-deposits of our history Today a backhoe divulged out of a crumbling flank of earth one bottle amber perfect a hundred-year-old cure for fever or melancholy a tonic for living on this earth in the winters of this climate.” It has been one year since I moved to Santa Fe. People still ask me "Do you like it in Santa Fe?" I am convinced that the longer you are in a place, the more it grows on you and, if you are willing, the more you learn. My friend from Pojoaque, Ray has bestowed on me a beautiful drum which he worked on for a month. First he selected a cottonwood trunk and hollowed it out to just the perfect depth for sound. Then he stretched a deer hide across the top and attached it with some straps. The drum stick too is a work of art. Native Americans have an amazing appreciation for nature. Nothing is discarded, everything is used--from the pine needles to the reeds by the stream to the trunks of a tree. Each and every item in nature is sacred and has meaning and usefulness. I was sitting in church today next to a young man who had earrings and was dressed in blue jeans like me. We look out on Santa Fe Mountain above the altar and through large windows onto the horizon. A squal was picking up and moving toward us. The top of Santa Fe Mt. is enveloped in a cloud which is dropping snow on it. The young man says, "It looks like it might snow." I looked out and saw it heading toward us. "Do you think we will really get snow?" I inquired. "Snow or rain it is all good." he replied. I could not have moved here without my friend Ellen's help or my niece, Reeve and her family. We have celebrated birthdays and weddings and visits. A South Africa friend Claudia is here. I met her sister Pauline and her daughter, Junita, over 30 years ago in Nairobi. We had a birthday party at the Tesuque Village Market for Claudia. My niece, Reeve and her husband Mike have done a wonderful job with the restaurant. They are building a pizza oven and have enclosed the outside porch and heated it so that you can 'sit outside' this winter. Reeve and Mike's sons appeared on my door step for Halloween as Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker. The littlest one could not keep his helmet on for more than one minute. Fiestas, Spanish Market, Indian Market and Halloween have all come and gone. At the high school, teachers are not allowed to distribute candy and even the coke machines now have only sugar free drinks. So my students have turned to caffeine and "red bulls" and "Dynamites" in the morning. We had one orgy of candy on halloween and then it was onto the elections for an orgy of politics. The only way to really impress students is to be funny and provocative so halloween and the elections provided common cause. My colleague and I decided that we would dress up in period costumes. Chanelle is an english teacher and was Hester Prynne from the Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne. I was Abe Lincoln from our Civil War studies and the students had read the Gettysburg address and the Emancipation proclamation. Our school lost one teacher this month from ovarian cancer. In the tribute that was paid to her by the students during a memorial services, some of them said, "She taught us about complex physics and biology." However, it was more than that, they said, she taught them to question. In the beginning of the year, she brought a black box with something in it to class. Throughout the year, they asked question after question, trying to determine "What is in it?" They never got the answer. I asked one student who had completed a terrific assignment on diaries and letters of the Civil War how she had impersonated a slave so well in a diary. It astounded me that a girl from the southwest who has scant experience of the North and South, let alone what it was like to be a slave. We agreed that slaves probably could not write well, or they had taught one another. She replied, "I love Anne Frank, and I feel what she wrote too." One just has to be open for the wonderous moment and experience it once it comes. It really does not matter where it occurs as long as you are there.