Anne and I are savoring the artistic community, the beautiful country, the spicy food, and the literary inspiration here at The Glen Workshop in Santa Fe. And our cats are having a great deal of fun with our generous house-sitter.
We wish you were here. The Glen Workshop is a one-of-a-kind event, with inspiring lectures, concerts, visual art exhibitions, and seminars everywhere you turn. Warren Farha has transformed one large room into a satellite bookstore for Eighth Day Books, and stocked it with just about every book that’s ever meant anything to me… not to mention about a thousand volumes I need to read right away.
Among the highlights so far:
- Author Andy Crouch exhorted us to pursue artistic excellence fearlessly.
- Gregory Wolfe challenged us to revise our misguided understanding of the Incarnation as God condescending to become a pathetic human, and to realize that it is actually God manifesting himself in the glory of what he meant for humanity to become — something fully human, and glorious.
- Valerie Sayers reading a new short story about baseball and destructive bias.
- Lynn Aldrich showing a slide presentation of her whimsical, beautiful artwork.
- Robert Deeble performing his song about Emily Dickinson.
- Debbie Blue sharing a homily about Abraham “the mad hobo”, and how true faith calls us to leave behind what we know and enter the unknown, even if it means we must live as crazy vagrants with no idea of where we’ll end up.
- EARTHSHAKING THUNDERSTORMS!
- Discovering an apricot tree outside my apartment with illustrator Barry Moser.
- Browsing the Eighth Day Bookstore, and discovering a brand new Scott Cairns book called The End of Suffering… which is based on an extraordinary lecture he gave at the Glen Workshop a few years ago.
- Lunch at Tomasita’s on S. Guadalupe Street, with Bob and Laurie Denst.
- Learning that a dear friend is expecting.
- Hanging out with my good friend Brian Bauer, a deacon in my church back in Seattle.
- Singing “Be Thou My Vision” with this crowd of visionaries… the hymn that Anne and I sang in our wedding.
- A quiet conversation about life’s twists and turns with novelist Robert Clark.
- Hugs from beautiful writers ladies as Luci Shaw, Jeannie Murray Walker, Leslie Leyland Fields, Denise Frame Harlan, Karin Bergquist, and best of all, my favorite poet… Anne.
And that’s to say nothing of the amazing road trip with poet John Baalke that got us here, or of Santa Fe itself, which I find to be the most aesthetically exciting place in the country. Our road trip to Santa Fe was full of awe-inspiring sights… especially the stretch from Moab to Monticello… and we’re grateful for our friend, poet John Baalke, who invited us to make the trek with him. But now that we’re here, we’re soaking up the sunlight, the art, and the powerful sense of the Spirit at work.
This video by John Baalke is a souvenir from the drive to Santa Fe, where Over the Rhine will be be playing on Saturday night for the Glen Workshop. We can’t wait.
OK, so you’re sharing an apartment with Barry Moser, or you discovered the apricot tree with him? Either way, very cool. Perhaps he could whip up an apricot woodcut for you….
Have a great time you guys! I wish I was there…though if I was I’d be missing my family here. Life’s twists and turns indeed!
Envy abounds in this household… but your highlights remind us of the good times we had in ’06. Which, by the way, was the year Cairns gave that “End of Suffering” speech. And here’s my confession: Scott left an extra printout of that lecture lying around in the computer room, and I may have possibly tucked it in my bag. Maybe.