Mabel Dodge Luhan House, Taos, New Mexico.
This adobe house is on the edge of Indian Land belonging to Taos Pueblo.
It was once a gathering place for artists including Willa Cather, Ansel Adams, Georgia O'Keefe, DH Lawrence and others.
It is now a bed and breakfast and also a setting for writing and art retreats.
Twentyfive of us had it all to ourselves for a week as we studied writing and
meditation with Natalie Goldberg. It was a silent retreat. We talked in class but otherwise kept silence.
Meals in silence were particularly powerful. You really taste the food when you aren't' making small talk with
the person sitting next to you! And you are alone with your thoughts. It's just you and...you.
We read and discusssed "When Death Comes for the Archbishop" by Willa Cather. I recommend it to everyone.
The descriptions of the landscape of the Southwest are remarkable. One way to improve your writing is to look at the
writing of others. We also read parts of a memoir by Patricia Hampl. She was one of the first memoirists to break the frame. Instead of waiting until the end of her life to write about it, she writes about where she is right now. Take a look.
So three squares were appreciated. I could do a blog on food alone.
Just check out the morning menu!
The above are from restaurants we went to. Art everywhere! Rich southwest palette and always great food.
3 comments:
What a cornucopia of food, spirit, ideas, and talent - emerging and remembered.
I never liked Willa Cather much, but I read Death during a dreary winter in Cambridge. I'm sure her talent leaps from the walls in Taos!
I had to reach to the solitary writing...not sure how it popped into my mind but, apologies to Colleridge:
Alone, alone, all, all alone,
Alone on a wide wide sea !
And never a saint took pity on
My soul in agony.
No...!
react....sorry
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