The blog's new look, Sunbeam, and finding our poetry

I've been playing around with the blog layout. Yesterday I deleted something I shouldn't have and it got very strange just as I had to turn off the computer. Now I think everything is working fine.

I've long wanted to make it really clear that this blog is just a part of what I've written on Mexico, so now I've got the links to the different sections of this website as well as a link to Kelly's photos of Mexico that he put up on Flickr. If you love photos and have never been to Flicker, don't just stop with his section... many, many people have posted interesting photos there.

I had to turn off the computer because it was time to bury Sunbeam's ashes. Our ten-year-old Basenji had been euthanized when untreatable cancer was found while we were in Guanajuato in January, and I blogged about it at the time. Luckily, with our good internet connection, we were able to make the decisions. She had been cremated and so yesterday Kelly and I, along with our friend Owen who was living in our house while we were gone, went up to the highest point of our land here in Colorado and buried her ashes in a big hole she had dug. I went through several tissues with my tears.

Then we sat around and told Sunbeam stories over iced tea and cookies. The conversation rambled to larger issues, like what we are doing with our lives. Owen is a strawbale builder who has been the director of Builders without Borders. He has a new website for his organization, the Geiger Reseach Institute of Sustainable Building... that's a photo of our living room on his homepage, and the mountain shot is taken from our land.

I pulled out a library book I was reading, The Treehouse: Eccentric Wisdom from My Father on How to Live, Love, and See, by Naomi Wolf. Her father, Leonard Wolf, now in his 80s, was long a professor of poetry at San Francisco State. Here's a bit I read out loud:

He is a teacher, and has taught in every kind of setting, for almost sixty years. He changes people's lives because he believes that everyone is here on earth as an artist; to tell his particular story or sing her irreplaceable song; to leave behind a unique creative signature. He believes that your passion for this, your feelings about this, must take priority over every other reasoned demand: status, benefits, sensible practices...

When people spend time around my dad, they are always quitting their sensible jobs with good benefits to become schoolteachers, or agitators, or lutenists. I have seen students of his leave high-paying jobs that were making them miserable, or high-status social positions that had been scripted by their families, and follow their hearts in the face of every kind of opposition to become, say, dirt-poor teachers of children in the mountain villages of the Andes. I've seen the photos they send back to him, of themselves with their tattered, clowning kids, their faces suffused with joy. They have found their poetry.

May we all find our poetry.