April is getting serious. I don’t know what that is, but when it rolled through, we got snow. That picture says a lot about New Mexico. It’s like loving giant crocodiles and the only way to make them come is holding out your leg.
Something else jumped out at me yesterday besides those clouds. Apparently the late Peter Matthiessen’s last book, Homegoing, (just published) includes an account of the Crucifixion from the Apocrypha, wherein the thief hanging next to Jesus asks him if he can join him in Paradise. His reply?
“No, friend, we’re there now.”
This morning my wife saw me sitting here and demanded a smile from me. “Life is good,” she said. While she was still standing there in her bathrobe, I recounted the above. She gave me one of those looks I can’t escape from and declared,
“You’d better remember that!”
John Hamilton Farr lives at 7,000 feet in Ranchos de Taos, New Mexico, U.S.A. As New York Times best-selling author James C. Moore tells it, John is “a man attuned to the world who sees it differently than you and I and writes about it with a language and a vision of life that is impossible to ignore.” This JHFARR.COM site is the master writing archive. To email John, please see CONTACT INFO on .png)
Ummm, if memory serves me, which it often doesn’t, you’re off a tad on the Jesus thing.
Anyway, that’s a nice photo. It shows the New Mexico I remember from when I used to travel there a lot.
Not sure where you’re coming from on that. Do you know about the Apocrypha? Lots of good stuff there, major bits the ecclesiastical censors cut out of the “official” bible (the gospel of Thomas, for example)— guided by the hand of God, of course, no political or ideological considerations whatsoever. 🙂
As for me, that plus Rev. Benton in Abilene, TX telling me at age fourteen that little black babies in the Congo would go to hell if they died before being baptized immunized me for life from organized religion. If he only knew how great a gift he gave me!
Finally, and not that this is aimed at you, but The Testament of Mary, a work of fiction by Colm Toibin, is an excellent book for getting to the very human heart of what supposedly went down. True believers can read that without offense, though some might start to wonder. I can’t recommend it enough.
(“No, friend, we’re there now” makes perfect sense to me, of course.)
just heard Mathieson died. what a writer!