I've written about my home on the High Desert and have used a few stock photos to illustrate my entries. Now that my wife has given me a camera, I thought I'd post some photos showing the macro and micro view of my back yard. I must tell you, though, I'm having a difficult time figuring out how to use what are now three different photo software programs: HP Photosmart, Corel, and Canon ZoomBrowser. In a few cases, I haven't even been able to find where the photos were stored :) They were one place yesterday but another place today. Maybe once I get the basics down, I'll know how to enhance these things. Any help would be appreciated.

            One of the things I like best about what I do is coming across a client who truly loves what she or he does, whether for a living or as a personal interest. No matter what it might be -- art, craft, profession -- I love to hear the person across from me speak in detail about what they do and how they do it. The intense interest and enjoyment they take from what they do enlivens them. I can see it in their eyes, hear it in their voice. Often, they gesture with their hands, words alone not exclamation enough to stress their point. One of the most fulfilled people I know -- not a client but a friend in his 70s -- has lived most of his life as a river runner, a horse outfitter and fierce environmentalist. His passion is for the land of Southern Utah. As a young man in his 20s, he fell in love with the idea of letting the Colorado River carry him and his client-explorers through canyons cut deep into the vast sagebrush country around them. It is land so colorful that Native Americans called it the land of frozen rainbows. The Native Americans were referring to the sandstone arches that span the canyons, bridging the two sides. Perhaps they were also referring to the layers of red, brown, and deep mahogany stone that form the canyon walls.

My friend's emphasis was on following the course of the land, gliding along the river or riding up on the sage, disturbing as little of the natural setting as possible. After all, it was the natural setting that he and his customers came to see. He views what he was doing as proper use of the land. He does not see as proper the philosophy of altering the land to suit human growth, as the U.S. government did when it built Glen Canyon Dam in the 60s. The dam backed up the Colorado River and inundated the natural cathedral in the desert that was Glen Canyon, a subterranean oasis of lush green plants shaded from the direct rays of the searing desert sun by canyon walls trickling with water seeping from aquifers. The light that reached the canyon floor was soft, and reflected off the water to flicker and dance against the walls. Also lost to the rising water were the mysteriously abandoned Anasazi tribal ruins, the only lasting sign of a people who simply disappeared from the Earth without explanation. The water pooled and created Lake Powell, a popular setting for powerboaters who come in numbers so large that their feces has become a major source of pollution. My friend sees the blue, man-made lake, pretty as it might be, as a grave marker for something far more beautiful and natural, lying dead below.

As the water rose behind Glen Canyon Dam, my friend added environmentalism to his list of passions. It is a passion that will live in him until he draws his last breath. Still, he and other environmentalists lost their battle to save Glen Canyon, all their protests in court having been rejected in favor of a national policy to develop the Southwest for human consumption: Los Angeles, Phoenix, Las Vegas. My friend persisted in his other passions -- running the river, living in a land of beauty, avoiding the rat race. But his life was not as easy as some might think. Romantic, yes, but easy, no. He worked hard and lived lean for most of his life, never realizing much profit until he was in his 60s. By that time, he was owner of a working ranch he turned into a guest ranch, set halfway up the volcano-shaped peaks of the LaSalle Mountains of Southeastern Utah. Tough times came and tough times went, and never did he think about turning back on what he knew was his life adventure. The challenges had payoffs; he lived an independent life richly stimulated by the spirituality of the land around him.

Unfortunately, too many people don't have work they love. They struggle with jobs they find to be pressure-packed and thankless. And the pay? Does a lot of money compensate for working a job that drains the enthusiasm from life? Well, I've spoken with people who make a lot of money but who still hate their work and, far too often, hate their lives as a result. Although my friend showed exceptional courage and independence of purpose in living the life he loved, not everyone has the courage, not everyone can create the circumstances, to follow his example. But, even though they may be shackled to a thankless job, they can develop an avocation -- even if it earns no money -- that can energize their lives. I've known people to find it in fishing; I've known people to find it in running or bicycling; I've known people to find it in writing; I've known people to find it in reading; I've known people to find it in raising and racing homing pigeons; I've known people to find it in dog-breeding; I've known people to find it in endless self-learning. All of these are examples of interests we can embrace and master, or at least work toward mastering, that can focus us on the worthwhile of life, something that is ours, that we can enjoy and control without interference. Whether they are the successful and high functioning clients in my private practice or the chronically mentally ill clients I see in a community clinic, I recommend they aggressively pursue their chosen vital interests or develop one if they haven't already. True to the word "vital," they are life-giving.

Therapist Remembered as One Who Refreshed the Broken - New York Times

I am remembering a brilliant December morning. The sun was just rising over Utah's Wasatch Mountains. The snow in the broad Salt Lake Valley glistened in the sun's rays as a twin-engine plane flew south toward Monument Valley where I and a photographer on board would tell a story of murder. Two Navajo tribal policemen had been brutally beaten, shot, then burned, their bodies left in a Chevy Suburban van deep in a remote canyon. I remember the first misleading information -- given out by the Bureau of Indian Affairs police -- speculating that the killing was the work of drug smugglers, who were known to land small planes on remote Utah and Arizona airstrips and roads, using only the light of the moon to guide them so that darkness and unpopulated emptiness might ensure their secrecy. This was the late 1980s, high tide for flamboyant smugglers. Crockett and Tubbs, for those who remember. Barry Seal and Billy Bob Bottoms for those who really know. In fact, the moon was nearly full the night of the killings.

That morning in December, as our plane entered Monument Valley, the red rock of the world-renown monuments glowed crimson against a cloudless blue sky, the sandstone set aflame by the light of an intensifying sun. Down the side of one of the red mesas, a string of snowmelt flowed like molten silver to the valley floor. On the sagebrush expanse below us, an elderly woman with a long wooden staff and a herding dog shooed along a flock of sheep. Her hair was in a bun, her wrinkled face unprotected from the sun. As she walked, her ankle-length, bright red and blue dress would catch in the sagebrush, and she would tug it free. The scene was as old as the culture that I and the photographer were about to immerse ourselves in, off and on, for the next two years. The story would turn out to have elements of the occult, of Navajo rituals involving witchcraft. We would learn that the killers, young Navajo men, some of them still in high school, had later called on spiritual practitioners to cleanse them of the evil that threatened to consume them for what they had done. There is much more to the story, and it is a grim one to be sure. But from it I took an uplifting anecdote that has great personal meaning for me. I hope it will be of value to you as well.  

One aspect of the story was to interview bereaved family members. The photographer and I traveled far back a washboard dirt road to a remote corner of the reservation to speak to the mother of one of the slain officers. She still lived in the dirt hogan where the officer had been born and raised. For the unfamiliar, a hogan is a dome-shaped hollow mound of dirt with a hole in the top to vent the fire in the center that provides heat for warmth and cooking. That fire is the only source of heat even on the freezing nights of a high-desert winter. The officer's mother spoke no English, only Navajo. A granddaughter served as translator so that I could conduct my interview. The photographer videotaped us with a camera, which, though not exactly high-tech, appeared to be some tri-podded contraption from the distant future against the ancient scene. When the interview was done, the officer's mother withdrew to the hogan. I politely asked another family member if I could see the inside of the hogan. I wanted to see firsthand the spareness and simplicity that still dominated life for many on the reservation. Polite as I was, and as welcome as I was made to feel, I still felt like an intruder. I couldn't help but fear that I might appear to be the stereotypical TV ghoul. Inside the hogan, the officer's mother sat on a wooden bench and wept. I looked around very briefly. As I was preparing to leave, the woman grabbed my right hand in both of hers. Still sobbing, she rocked her upper body back and forth ever so slightly, her head bowed, as she spoke what seemed like a chant. "What is she saying?" I asked her granddaughter. "She is thanking you for coming and being a pathway out for her grief," the young girl said. It might seem overly dramatic to say, but in that moment I felt my life deepened in some richly positive way. I also felt humbled. And absolved. To this woman, I was not an intruder. I was someone who could help her heal. 

I've never forgotten that moment, but nearly 20 years later, again in a December, I was reminded strongly of it. Now a clinical social worker, I was contemplating my brief work with a cancer patient who died in that winter month. He, too, was from a culture different than my own. He was a staunch member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. That is, he was a Mormon. Yes, he was very much a product of modern culture. Unlike the Navajo woman, this patient, 50 years old, lived in the Salt Lake Valley, just as I do. It is a modern setting of crowded cities sprawling north, south and west along the Wasatch Mountains. He was well-educated, supporting his family of five through a high-tech job. When I first met him in a hospital room, he was depressed and tearful, worried that his wife was bearing an unbearable burden, that she was having to shoulder too much responsibility and emotional freight in managing his disease and its impact on the family. He spoke little, and I could never differentiate whether his reserve was due to his physical suffering or what I believed to be his shy nature. In fact, at first, I didn't think I was engaging him. I will not go into the details of the techniques that I initially used to relieve his painful depressive and anxious thoughts. What I find most interesting is the apparent relationship that developed between us despite what little we said to each other. Each time he came into the hospital for scheduled chemotherapy, his wife would call and ask that I see him. Each time, I would sit with him. Each time, we said relatively little to each other. But we would connect, the most telling evidence of the connection being his smile and, sometimes, laughter. Once, amid a long silence, he reached up from his bed and grasped my hand. The very last time I saw him, he was about to go home with hospice treatment. He was awake and lucid enough to tell me that I had helped him much. And still I wondered to myself just how that might have been. A few days later, he died at home.

How were either of these connections made? How did a Navajo woman find connection and comfort in a brief conversation with a somewhat hard-edged reporter? How did a devout Mormon find help and comfort in brief and relatively silent encounters with a man who, yes, professionally trained, is the product of experiences that shaped a life philosophy greatly different from his own? I am skeptical of the idea of a "higher power," believing instead that even if there is a supernatural overseer of life, the power to do anything lies in us. I love the question and answer contained within the book, "Sophie's Choice": Question: Where was God at Auschwitz? Answer: Where was man? In addition to that skepticism, I have become -- for lack of a better way of putting it -- a very "liberal" thinker. My philosophy was shaped by a childhood, financially poor, that saw callousness and yet courage in the face of it, that embraced as life-asserting thrills those activities that the devoutly religious patient might have seen as sins. I and my boyhood friends engaged in activities that Camus would have seen as "burning the heart you exult." The patient's religion would have scorned them. And yet, here we were, he and I, connected by a positive tension that neither of our philosophies could accurately express. In ways they perhaps did not know, the Navajo woman and the Mormon man were there for me, as importantly, if not more importantly, than I was there for them. Maybe the answer to my question and its mystery is the unexplained power of simply "being there" for one another. If there is a God, maybe that being, whether masculine or feminine, supernaturally real or a product of imagination, meant that to be the answer: being there. It is a transformative gift that we too often deny ourselves and others.

A light rain falls as we walk toward San Sulpice and dinner. We hope an untried restaurant will be as good as the others we've sampled in that section of Paris, newly discovered to us on this trip. To our right, the Luxembourg Gardens are growing dark. Through the black iron bars of its fence, we see a man jogging and a young couple holding hands. Earlier, the park's crisscrossing paths were busy with Parisians walking between shops, restaurants and work places on boulevards St. Michele and Montparnasse. Nonchalant to the daily rush, picnickers, readers and sunbathers lazed on its benches. By this time of evening, they have moved on. Even the bright flowers are fading from sight in the darkening overhang of tree branches thick with leaves. Green and gray dominate all colors in the spring evening. The city's sidewalks and the cafes lining them carry the social scene now. Under awnings quickly rolled down against the drizzle and inside the glass of yellow-lit solariums, people sit around small round tables crowded with wine carafes, glasses and petite coffee cups. They animate their conversations with hand and facial gestures, the listener just as active in expression as the talker. Small dogs rest their heads beneath tables, as welcome as their people to the warmth of socialization. Voices are loud with argument and laughter, their levels competing at times with the rush of traffic, still heavy on the boulevards. It is an electric hour, though when you love Paris as much as I do, it is difficult to measure more wattage in one hour than another. It's just that now the buzz of the workday and the evening rush has been replaced with a more casual atmosphere. Like us, people around us have the air of pleasure-seekers: The giggling teenagers on the walk in front of us, The middle-age man and woman exchanging pecks on the cheek as they huddle arm and arm under an umbrella. Parisians work hard, but they seem to revive from a second wind this time of day. Pleasure requires work, too, but savoring life is energizing. It offsets fatigue and weariness. Even the flowers of the Luxembourg, their brilliant colors now unseen, give off a richer perfume in the warm evening drizzle. Denied a visual medium of expression, they take advantage of scent to assert their life, making the most of available conditions. To me, that is the message of the French culture: Thrive in any light; thrive even in its absence; make the most of any hour; fill it with life's full wattage. And so the Parisians and their flowers enliven the evening, embracing the night as they do the day.

We all look for meaning in our lives, some of us more aware o