“It looks like Nepal,” she said, checking out my photo of Kachina Peak. Yes, it’s amazing what you can produce with Photoshop and a washed-out telephoto image. If only I knew what I was doing, I thought, pulling sliders back and forth to make things happen that I hardly understood, retracing my steps, boosting this and cutting that.
Earlier that day I’d been out walking where I took that shot. At a certain spot, I took off my hat, stood up straight, and tried emptying my mind. I do this occasionally in special places. It can take several long moments to have no thoughts and just be listening. If I’m calm and present and sincere, something almost always happens then. This time I heard words quite clearly in my head: “HAVE FUN!”—twice, for emphasis, loud and in no voice I recognized. The angels finally found a nail to pound into my skull, I guess.
Stepping back onto the trail, I thought of my sister Teresa, who would have had no problem with this teaching. Another time out hiking, I seemed to hear her in my mind, far away and quiet. She wanted to tell me something then, be yourself, in fact, and here it was again but more direct. Kryptonite for crazy with my history, chilluns. You just have to pin me down first.
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)
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