Some people like to get a blog post sent right to their email. It’s sort of nice – a voice from the outside world. This blog is rarely, if ever, selling anything. Instead, it’s a bit about art, a bit about traveling, a bit of observations, a bit about life, a bit about painting. If you would like to subscribe to this blog and get it in your inbox when it’s published – entirely intermittently – twice a week then nothing for a month, for instance – please do so in the side bar, or, if you are receiving this email via Facebook or somewhere else, please go here: http://www.tenthousandvisions.com/blog and sign up.

I recently partnered with Conscious Alliance again (I’ve made a few posters for them in the past). The new poster is for Sound Tribe Sector Nine (who now goes by STS9) and was given out at some recent shows they played in Georgia. Conscious Alliance is a great organization based out of Colorado who gives out posters at various events in exchange for donations of money and/or canned goods. From their website: “Since inception in 2002, we have successfully collected and distributed over 500,000 pounds of non-perishable food donations to local food pantries and impoverished communities across the United States.”

Here is the poster, using a detail of the image ‘Standing on the Shoulders of Giants’.

I just uploaded a new gallery of photos to the Traveling section of TenThousandVisions.com. Funny thing is that for all the time spent getting to and being at and coming from Bonnaroo I took one picture and that was of a lacewing sitting on a print of mine. Too bad too because our set up this time around looked really nice – with our gallery walls, the Mirador Glass hand blown lampshades… lovely! But alas!

Anyhow, tho, these are the illustrations I suppose for all of the blogs I posted along the way – from the Colorado Rockies to the Grand Canyon and Sedona. I really like taking pictures while traveling and see it as a way of framing an experience, capturing a moment for future reference. Admittedly my memory isn’t as sharp as I might like it to be. Or, rather, my memory for a vision or painting idea is sharp but my memory for events and places, well, not so much.

These are a few of those captured memories, our summer road trip through the National Parks: Summer 2009

On and On and On.
This is the last chapter. I promise. Cause we’re back and unpacked. But it was a while in getting here. The last stint of driving – from Sedona to San Diego with a stop in Quartzite to look at rocks in the insane heat went quickly, with us getting home at a reasonable hour. The rental car – that giant Toyota Sequoia we’d been driving – was returned without any issues the next day after a thorough cleaning but we left the Bonnaroo Vendor Vehicle sticker on it by accident. It drove off into the rows of Enterprise Rental car fleets, a little wiser, a good adventure under it’s belt. The other cars looked at it with respect.

Sedona was a treat. Tasting wine, looking at art, an early morning hike into the giant red rock formations and climbing up onto their curving feet – high up so I could see the valley. Breathing with the world – the birds and trees and dirt and bugs and rocks and clouds. I’d like to open a gallery there one day.

Stay focused. Work hard. The universe responded.

Check.

A day or two before we’d been at the Grand Canyon which, following my morning hike and our drive around to the South Rim, was a bit less impressive due to the fact that cloud cover diffused the light to such a state that depth was a bit hard gauge – the reds and purples and oranges along with the insane fractaling depth to it were a but hard to read. Instead we were greeted by the subtle fractioning off of every curve, every bend, every cliff and drop – it drops, it ends, it curves, it drops more… down down down… almost as deep as every canyon of my own mind.

They say the Grand Canyon makes one feel very small. I felt just the right size for it. Like I could stare at it for a long long time.

I’d like to mention that, while we were there, I learned of an architect whose work I admired for it’s nuanced attention to detail, no matter how trivial. That would be Mary Colter, the designer of the Watchtower at the Desert View area of the South Rim. Built in 1932, it’s a simple building that is delicately rendered. According to Wikipedia she was “a chain-smoking perfectionist, she cared about backstory and attractive features.” After the gift shop on the first floor – full of trinkets, knick knacks and expensive Native American pottery – the walls and ceilings of the subsequent levels are painted in Hopi murals by artist Fred Kabotie – delicately rendered, large, graphic, symbolic – they speak on many different levels and were something I hadn’t expected.

The view from the top was very much the same as the view from below. Gaining 50 feet of elevation at the Grand Canyon doesn’t change the fact that what you are looking at is very huge. At that proportion, your 50 feet higher is a drop in a bucket.

We enjoyed our last night camping, our morning breakfast, and then packed up, on our way to Sedona, where we spent the night at a hotel, tasted wine and at cheese at the Page Springs Winery (not bad, all things considered), poked our heads into a few art galleries, and had an enjoyable meal at ChocolaTree – a raw/vegan restaurant in town.

I woke in the morning, went for a hike, as I mentioned, and then, after a breakfast in the mountains, we were on the road, destined for home this time – as the final stop – to join our friends for a barbeque on the 4th. A lovely tour of the country. Our country might be short on brains sometimes but it has some priceless landscape. I hope it is treasured for a long long time.

Giant raindrops intermittently pelt our windshield while the sun still streams through the clouds, casting rays of lights through long cracks in the cloud cover revealing a blue sky beyond. We are driving through the western foothills of the Colorado Rockies. From Boulder the highway crested up and over hills into mountains passing Loveland and Vail and various other ski mountains with still snowy peaks and multi-million dollar condos butting up against their feet, occasionally a mine along the river mining gold or copper leaving obscene scars long the hillsides. The aspen and pine intermingling til the pine leaves it for the higher elevations. The mountains just as quickly turn into shear cliffs along the Colorado River – the cliff faces jutting out at odd angles and millions of right angles of every size. Now the cliffs have turned to arid woods, chaparral and tall wide mountains that will soon again change to something else- Arches and Canyonlands Parks, our next destinations.

We left Boulder after a hike in Gregory Canyon and a breakfast of mimosas and eggs benedict at the Chataqua Gathering Place, a lodge built in the late 1800′s for the advancement of education and the arts. Their wide green lawn and the copper red Flatiron Mountains as a backdrop made for a lovely parting meal. The day before we’d woken at the Alps Inn, a bed and breakfast lodge up a different canyon outside of Boulder where we’d spent the night of our first anniversary as a wedded couple.

These trips we make around the sun leave markers in our minds and it’s nice to focus our selves and reflect for a moment and consider what comes next. It was both our anniversary and the Summer Solstice – something of a natural anniversary – the longest day of the year. A year isn’t a long time in retrospect but, then, in the middle of it, it can seem to stretch forever. There aren’t always agreements and sometimes there can be a fierce disagreement. But then – the agreements, the love, and the dance that we do through the nuts and bolts of our lives, is lovely and wonderful.

For our first year anniversary, we timed this trip to land us in Boulder and the Rockies. We’d gathered together a picnic lunch of cheese (a nice variety: a porter cheddar, triple cream brie, a sheep’s milk gouda, a red pepper havarti, and, our favorite, the Humboldt Fog chevre – a deliciously potent and creamy cheese.), wine, olives, sun-dried tomatoes, a sourdough bread, and other assorted tasty treats and hiked it up to the top of Alberta Falls, a fairly short hike to be certain, where we enjoyed the roaring river, the tasty lunch, the wine, the sun, and each other’s presence. The light green leaves of the aspen trees fluttered in the sunlight and cast dappled shadows over the rock strewn ground. Little wild flowers poked up here and there and the entire thing was such a lovely experience of sensations: flavors – the food, the wine, the taste of the breeze; sounds – the river, laughter, birds; scents – mountain air, pine, the cold water; textures of cheese and water, rock and leaves; amd sights – the colors of the rocks and the sun glinting off the endless river ripples.

We left the park early-ish and, on our way to the inn, stopped at a winery tasting room and picked up a bottle of a locally made Syrah along with some smoked trout, said hi to the geese along side the pond and then wound our way down the mountain highway to the inn where we enjoyed the wine, the trout, the hot tub in our room, the pipe in low volume Billie Holiday and other old time jazz and blues, and then, come morning, a delicious breakfast of quiche, coffee and scones.

That morning, leaving the inn, we drove to Twin Sisters Peaks with Violet eyeing the gathering clouds.

Looks like rain, she said. And then again. And then again, reminding me that she was not going to be stoked if she was hiking in the rain.

Yes dear, i replied.

And so we hiked up and up and up: the tumbled and strewn rocks and dotted with moss, the birds that darted through the tall pine that waved and sighed in the breeze, whispering pine secrets amongst each other. A few drops started to come down so we scrambled up to the top of a tall rocky promontory where we had an incredible view of the flat stone face of Long’s Peak in the distance with it’s snowy glaciers and years of compounded snow, and then further down – the valley the river, and other rocky outcroppings and the, from there, seemingly endless sea of pine.

After a quick hike down we decided to drive up further into the park and see what we might find. We took the 34 through the northern edge of the park and along the way:

• saw half a dozen bighorn sheep alongside a river where they congregate and eat mud for it’s mineral content
• were awed by the wide grassy meadows with the slowly curving river and fields of wild flowers and massive mountains that sloped down from either side
• stopped to hang out with a couple of really large male deer with furry antlers, grazing on grass and flowers.
• and on and on and on….

…til we drove up a random road that dead-ended in a valley at the aptly named Endovalley picnic area. We parked and then hiked up a road for a ways til we reached Chasm Falls, a lovely roaring falls in the woods surrounded by rocks, no one around, the sun shining on us from the now bright blue sky and a lovely afternoon. We hiked back to the car, had some cheese, olives, wine, and then drove onwards through the park, stopping at a wide open meadow speckled with yellow, purple, and white wild flowers and ending in tall pine framing a panoramic view of the mountains with myself allowing promises to return for a longer multi-day hike. From there we drove back down through the park to my aunt and uncles house just south of Boulder where we had a delicious dinner, some wine, nice conversation and finally went to bed early so we could wake early and get to hiking in the morning.

Now, after all that we round the highway into a valley ringed by mountains to one side and lush fertile vineyards and farmlands and golden tinged mesas in the evening sun setting over the last stretches of Colorado, hoping to make it to Arches National Park before too late.

I’m on my way to the Bonnaroo Music Festival in Manchester, TN where we are doing our tenthousandvisions-once-a-year-giant-festival-vending-experience. We went three years ago, had a great time, and now are doing it again with a lot more experience under our belts and a far more solid plan of attach. When we’re finished, Violet and I will make our way back home via Kentucky (visit her dad), then Colorado (visit the mountains) and finally to Utah and Arizona (visit the canyons). It’s work. It’s vacation. it’s a summer roadtrip.

I’m driving a giant SUV packed with all the necessary things for three or four weeks of travel- the camping/play time stuff and the vending/festival/art stuff. So much stuff! Some people continue on – festival after festival – but we have neither the time nor the energy for that. I don’t want to become a fixture anywhere, preferring the magic of a one-time meeting rather than becoming something that is expected.

I’ve written before tho about bringing art to the masses and Bonnaroo is exactly that. I find that the events that tend towards my own community of people out here tend to feel a little like preaching to the choir sometimes. It’s cool and fun and all – but it’s not different and that "different" feeling – that experience of encountering something entirely "other" and yet, very much reflective of yourself, is really where an energetic opening happens. I like that and I like being able to be that sort of catalyst.

Anyhow, I’m driving alone right now, an empty passenger seat beside me. But i’m not taking other passengers! Violet holds that reservation and I’m picking her up at the airport in Little Rock, AR on Tuesday afternoon because she has finals to finish and then is graduated, done with undergrad work at last! She’s worked hard at it for a long time now and I’m proud of her for getting through. But that leaves me on my own for now. However, while I do love the company – she is my wife and best friend after all – a little alone time, time to totally chill is nice. There’s no rush and I can actually relax for a bit til I have to kick back into gear in a few days for festival-public-relations mode. There will be plenty of talking!

So, last night, I finally got out of San Diego at 8:30 after stopping at Whole Foods and Kinkos and did about four hours of driving til fatigue started to set in. 6 hours sleep a night for the past week while busting my ass each day has left me a bit weary. But no rest for the weary, we say!

The humble little town of Blythe, on the CA/AZ border, was the spot on the map for me and I pulled into a motel. The woman at the window of the motel wore pants that could have fit ten of me. When she waddled over to the register, granting me a view of her rolls from the side and, with her thighs busting the seams of even those pants, I wondered if the slave labor in some third world country where those plus plus plus size dollar bin pants are made wonder just what type of creature wears those things.

Now I’m on my way to Phoenix (a city I vowed never to return to 10 years ago) and then north to Flagstaff and onto a campground in the CIbola National Forest east of Albuquerque where I can pitch tent under tall watchful Ponderosa pine.

Because of the unrelenting amount of spam arriving in my comments, I adopted a sort of ostritch approach. I stuck my head in the sand: I turned the whole thing off and deleted every possible doorway into the comments (you wouldn’t believe how many ways there are for spambots to place trackbacks, etc into the "comments to moderate" folder.) Even still though, I received comments and trackbacks. At it’s peak it was around a thousand entries of viagra oxycotin filled spam links waiting to be moderated. So I spent some time looking around and finding a better system to use.

As you may or may not know, I do a lot of web design work for various clients and, along the way, have learned the ins and outs of WordPress along with a ton of useful plugins to help make my client’s lives easier. Most of the sites I make these days are based on wordpress for their content management system. Some of them don’t even have blogs and you’d never guess it was based on WordPress. But I digress… Along the way, anyhow, I found the cformsII plugin by www.deliciousdays.com. I really don’t know who or what delicious days is – some sort of cooking/food blog? – but someone over there made a kick ass form management plugin that allows for more customization, forms, styling, etc etc etc than anything else I’ve seen. While I could hard code a form into someone’s site, no one ever really wants it to work that way and, even for me, using some sort of management tool to do all the variables while I only have to think about how it looks, is a really nice plus. That said, it also works for comment management and tell-a-friend emails. Personally I don’t use it for the tell-a-friend aspect – that’s up to some previous scripting to handle – but the comment features are pretty nice, have some nice AJAX instant results sort of features and some nice verification aspects. And it’s pretty and pretty easy to use. Of course, I’ve turned off all the comment on the previous posts since once there is a way in, the spambots will do their best to weasel their ways back in but for now, we’ll see how this goes…

So I hope you consider leaving any thoughts you might have on something I add here! Thanks!