Volume 44 Issue 1 & 2: Healing

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This issue has been a long time coming, and we thank you for rolling with us while we worked to complete “Healing.” To make up for the long wait, this double issue is one of our biggest ever and a proper way to celebrate the healing facilitated by our talented writers. We’re slowly catching up and adapting to the changes in the world of publishing, and we appreciate the grace we received while completing our final decisions, the careful assembly of the order, and the design work done by our Editorial Assistants here at CSU Pueblo.

For “Healing,” we are thrilled to feature photography by Jim Ross— thoughtful shots of coneflowers, roses, thistles, and swallowtails. These images cause us not only to slow down and reflect on the beauty we need, they also show us the sharp parts of ourselves as we see in nature. We are fragile and also guarded when we listen to the landscape, alive around us.

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We are pleased to finally present the latest issue of Pilgrimage, “Edges and Borders,” despite all the delays. This has been an issue long in the making, and we are excited to share it with you. Here at Colorado State University Pueblo, the pandemic created countless challenges and we've undertaken adjustments to determine how we best move forward and stay afloat. For our contributors that have waited a long time—we appreciate your patience and we hope this issue is a proper celebration of your work. Your words carry so much inspiration, and we are honored to feature you and your writing.

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We are thrilled to finally present the “Fun House” issue of Pilgrimage, which experienced several delays because of COVID-19. Thank you for bearing with us as we had to leave our office and CSU-Pueblo campus in order to start working remotely. It continues to be a time of learning, transition, and uncertainty, but we will do that work together. With the publication of this and every issue of Pilgrimage, we will keep working to support antiracist action, climate justice, and social activism, as it all connects to our focus on story, spirit, witness, and place. Black Lives Matter. Black Trans Lives Matter. Indigenous Lives Matter. ICE Detainees Matter. We stand in support of all these causes in calling for justice for

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For this issue, we agreed to let the submissions shape the theme and focus. After reading so many inspiring words from all over the country and world, we were struck with awe by the writers who opened themselves up to being vulnerable in facing memories, to being admirably honest, and courageous enough to speak up against injustice. Like previous issues, our contributors continue to shine a light onto the horrors of our current administration and the injustices committed against our environment. We have poems capturing the uncertainty of Venezuela’s political strife that starves its people, poems demonstrating the power and fear wielded by the AK-47, and poems honoring missing journalists in Mexico.

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Back in November, I came across an article about the Blue Mesa Reservoir in Colorado drying out and revealing the abandoned town of Iola, Colorado. I was intrigued with Iola, a small town overtaken by water when the Blue Mesa Dam and Reservoir were first built in the 1960s. The foundations of buildings, long lost streets, and other abandoned artifacts can now be found. It reminds me how our myths unfold and how our stories remain close to nature. The resurfacing of Iola also points to the truly sobering part of the story: the Blue Mesa Reservoir’s

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In my past life, I was a punk kid, and I hung out in the scene, wearing my teenage rebellion and dying my hair outrageous blues, pinks, and greens. Even in the company of a rough crowd, in a dive bar reeking of cigarettes and too young to drink, I always felt safe. I felt moved by the message of unity that came out in fast lyrics, the 4/4 drum beats, and songs. The message always pushed right into your face, telling skinheads to go to hell and how it was okay to feel weird and alone in the world. We’re in this together. We’re all the same.

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Autumn in southern Colorado is always unpredictable. The degree differential climbs to 72 in the day and dips to freezing overnight. The snow may come at any moment, so we remain ready for its arrival. Each day is a new start that goes beyond the small talk about weather, that reminds us how the seasons may influence our mood and energy.

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A little over three years ago, I attended an ekphrastic workshop at the Smithsonian in Washington DC. It was organized by Letras Latinas and inspired by the exhibit, “Our America: The Latino Presence in American Art.” The exhibit and workshop traveled to other cities, letting the poets study, view, and then write poems inspired by the art, which went on to be published in several literary magazines.

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In 2009, we put together a Best of Pilgrimage anthology. This anthology is available for purchase. Here's a little more information on the contents of Telling it Real: The Best of Pilgrimage Magazine 2003-2008 - click here.

When we announced the themes of injustice and protest, we were overwhelmed with quality writing. We felt the outpouring of support for Pilgrimage and many worthy causes, issues, and movements. When I first started writing this before the election, I pondered if things worsened or if there was progress in the people raising their voices on the various fronts against injustice.

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I grew up on horror movies, ghost stories, and every chance I had, I’d explore scary, abandoned places. I’m still hooked on the throttle of my nervous heart beats that entice me to peer into the unknown parts of the night, to run upstairs when I’m scared, and curiosity when I can’t shake the feeling that I’m being watched. But why? What makes the fear tick and what happens when it’s too real?

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We’re pleased to be catching up with this special double-issue of two themes: “Flight” and “Beginnings.” We’re collecting feathers while thinking of Pablo Neruda, remembering the legendary beards of our fathers, feeling the burn of forest fires hot as our youthful sins, and walking away from the wedding bouquet resting at our feet.

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This has been a volatile winter in Southern Colorado. The snow arrived late and springtime temperatures interrupted the snow, only to be buried in more record amounts of snow. I am still shaking off the disorientation of daylight savings time and welcoming the time of year where we are greeted by more time with the sun.

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Until I started reading for this issue, I believed that sight overshadowed sound. While we may be writing in a world dominated by visual experiences, as I worked my way from one submission to the next, I encountered stanzas and paragraphs embedded with rhythm and music and engaged in thematic issues of the ear: the typewriter clacking a song, the tension found in a telemarketer’s call, and cicadas as the seasonal track tuned out, which Rebecca Aronson describes as “the sound of plucked wires under foot…that call out / their living seconds after the long wait.”

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After approximately eight months of protests, the Colorado Coalfield War came to an end on April 20, 1914, the day of the Ludlow Massacre. Twenty deaths in all occurred in the Ludlow Tent Colony, including a guardsman, miners, and their wives and children when Colorado militiamen and coal company guards attacked and set fire to the colony. The event brought workers’ rights and industrial worker-company relations into the national conversation. Thanks to the hard work of historians, scholars, union members, the Colorado National Guard, archaeologists, the Ludlow Commemoration Commission, religious leaders, musicians, and writers, these tragic events endure in our memory and continue to remind us that the rights of the worker stay an important cause.

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The ghost of Flannery O’Connor reaches into the Southwest and into this issue of Pilgrimage. She assumes many forms—a leaf frozen in the play of shadow and light, a mother doing her best not to repeat the bitterness of another family’s fight with cancer, the lingering scent of a dog sprayed by a skunk.

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This summer, Colorado suffered from wildfires again. I spent several evenings in Pueblo wandering through the eerie smoke, under a deep red moon. Like everyone else in the state, I looked up and silently requested rain. Now, toward summer’s end, every afternoon greeted us with storm clouds and much needed precipitation, but the rain has almost been overwhelming. As destructive as wildfires can be, many communities in Colorado have found themselves vulnerable to flash floods.

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The idea of arrivals and departures appeared to me on a day I drove a poet to the airport. We drove past the routine signage I always see on my way there. At first, I did not see it as a thematic framework. It seemed too straightforward, but driving back to Pueblo, I came to understand how it could unify a talented and diverse group of writers in one issue. It somehow resolved the struggle to figure out how to bring together all these writers, hailing from regions as far as the eastern seaboard, hidden towns in the Midwest, communities I’ve never seen on the west coast, and from the heart of the Southwest.

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Welcome, pilgrims and seekers! Poet David Romtvedt has selected our Words Along the Way excerpts from the memoirs of famed conservationist Margaret “Mardy” Murie (1902-2003). I met Mardy long ago and far away as a student in the Teton Science School’s summer High School Field Ecology Program, and was struck by her account of the division of labor between she and her biologist husband during their years of field work and advocacy. In a sentiment she’d repeat over the years as a touchstone for her life, she told our group of teens, “It was I who remembered the names of the people. And Olaus who remembered the names of the birds.” What a loving balance! To neither be lost in misanthropy nor anthropocentrism.

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We're traveling, in this issue, out to Lebanon, into the cottonwoods' celadon buds, road tripping through lives and hearts in Utah, NYC and beyond. Join the journey, and watch out for water's force and menace. Crows and herons fly on and off the pages; you may rise with wings and call after one you're following. The theme "Action & Rest" suggests cycles our bodies share with seasons, with trees, with tectonics ... and I wanted the work here to remind me, to remind all of us, that "action" and "rest" make each other vibrant. We're also reminded here that children are lightning rods for our active attention, and there's something blessed in their rest.

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Welcome to your season of returning light! First off: this is not the "death-themed issue" that some of my friends had assumed it to be. Perish the thought! Rather, I'm wondering what threads bind past to present, departed to living, and ethereal to corporeal. The threads themselves, rather than simply the reality of either condition, are what I'm out to explore. The connective tissues. The bridging bodies. Our writers and artists of the Greater Southwest

(and beyond!) reveal these threads/connections/bridges in the lives of owls, horses, children and mountains. They also attend to the physiological connection between the living and the dead made by our participation in the food chain and our dependence on fossils and trees for our own lives' fuel and shelter.

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How can I stay alive knowing so little? (
(Mary Crow, p. 4)

What is the cure for air that slows the breath with sheer impurities…?
(Blanche Farley, p. 42)

…will there rather be cause for simple trust in the Santa Ana winds?
(elena minor, p. 81)

These are among the several questions poets construct in this issue, questions that serve as a rope swing for the reader to seize in a leap out over the atmosphere of wonder.

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Human bodies, alive and in crisis, command the spotlight in the nonfiction books that have held my attention for the last 18 months. As distinct from the dying body, these bodies turn and tear within and without, with no end in sight. In particular, the books Mad in America, The Cure Within, and Walking Nature Home became absolute page-turners for me, in which I devoured accounts of both failed and successful treatments for various maladies. The drama of “treatment”—its paradoxes, shadowy unknowns, tensions and victories—became the story I couldn’t get enough of.

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TELLING IT REAL:
THE BEST OF PILGRIMAGE MAGAZINE

(VOLUME 34 OF PILGRIMAGE)

In lieu of new issues in 2009, we put together a Best of Pilgrimage anthology. This anthology has been sent out to all current subscribers and is now available for purchase. Here's a little more information on the contents of Telling it Real: The Best of Pilgrimage Magazine 2003-2008 - click here.

Contributions to this issue explore various dimensions of listening: in an exchange with someone whose political views are very different, in the silence of a Quaker meeting, in the midst of challenges, like parenting, which can be anything but contemplative. Some of the voices you will encounter in the pages that follow talk about the physical act of listening, others delve into the kind of inward listening that has more to do with discernment or just being present. Deep listening requires attention, persistence, and lots of practice, but the rewards, as Gene Hoffman and other writers point out, can be rich indeed.

What do you think of when you think of the 1960s? Maybe, the first man on the moon. Maybe Civil Rights marches. Maybe you flash on Dylan at the Newport Folk Festival, or the Grateful Dead at Merry Prankster acid tests, or Jimi Hendrix lighting his guitar on fire at Monterrey. Masters of War. China Cat Sunflower. Purple Haze. Maybe something else. This issue of Pilgrimage doesn’t intend to include all the events and voices from such a complex decade, but it does offer a few snapshots.

You can’t have a light
without a dark to stick it in.?
~Arlo Guthrie

In the physical realm, you can’t know the light without the shadow. On a personal level, I don’t think it’s any different. Dwelling only on the light in an attempt to avoid the shadow, distorts what is. The stories and poems that follow suggest a more integral view of shadow and light, one in which they might even be understood as “dependable companions.”

I If the way of peace is a way of being that is chosen, it is a choice is that is made from moment to moment. It would be naive to think that it is made easily; it would be ignorant to dismiss the wide range of challenges and tempations that get in the way of the Way. The spells cast by our own personal and cultural mythologies are more than enough to encourage our allegiance to other paths. Take, for example, the insistence of the politically powerful to sustain the same military industrial complex that an unlikely prophet (Dwight D. Eisenhower) warned about more than fifty years ago. Kat Meade takes us to the heart of the beast in her tour of the Nevada Test Site. Annie Dawid observes that the intertwined icons of militarism and masculinity are, at times, difficult to name and expose.

In the stories that appear in this issue, one form of passion often leads to another. In Mary Sojourner’s story, “Officer Magdalena, White Shell Woman, and Me,” a passion for place (the Grand Canyon and the Colorado Plateau) inspires the narrator to witness against a uranium mine in solidarity with those who experience their homeland as nothing less than holy. And in the process of this witness, the narrator senses a deeper, perhaps even spiritual, bond with those she encounters in a jail cell. Bearing witness to another man’s passion for place and prayer, Harrison Candelaria Fletcher feels led to consider the absence and presence of such passions in his own life. Simmons Bunting follows his daughter’s passion into the urban desert as they search for the lovely handcrafted bells, hung randomly throughout Tucson every year, to celebrate the life of a child that died much too soon. In the case of Ben’s Bells, grieving parents found a way to passion, and brought light and grace into their community as a result. I hope that these and other explorations in this issue may, in some small way, invite our own expressions of passion and compassion along the way.

In practice, I believe that being-at-home is always a work in progress. The Spanish word querencia describes that inward “place” where we are most at home—a place that is always present, though sometimes elusive. We feel it, we leave it, and then we want to find our way back. In his essay “Waterworks,” philosopher and writer Reyes Garcia, whose family has lived on the same southern Colorado ranch for generations, writes about the delights and challenges of living into one’s home place: “It is not simple to be so located, enfleshed in a concrete locus, nor is it easy to live up to its beauty.” Being at home, in this sense, is like any long-term relationship; it takes commitment, devotion, and work to keep the connection fresh and alive.

In this issue of Pilgrimage, David James Duncan writes about restoration as it applies to moving water, the movement of the Spirit, and sustenance for potentially lost souls. Susan Tweit describes a restoration project that reminds us we can do good work in small ways. Michelle Nickol hints at the kind of restoration that is needed on both sides of a prison wall. Nancy Leigh Harless tells the story of a good laugh that suggests the possibility of rehabilitation for a community of women in the war-torn Balkans. Amy Frykolm describes a turn toward the restoration of dignity that she witnesses while working in a high country soup kitchen.

The pursuit of happiness takes many forms in Volume 31 Issue 2 (Summer 2006) of Pilgrimage. In “Poets in America,” Robert Dawson recalls his own calling as a poet and some of the complexities that came with it. In “The Blue Beacon,” David Ray considers the economic gravity that pulls a young man north from Guate- mala to the borderlands of the United States and Mexico. Brenda Liebling- Goldberg considers the plight of a romantic Francophile in Alvin, Texas. Kim Stafford (“Highway 83 North / Out of Liberal / 5am”) takes us out on the road in pursuit of connection with family.

The stories in this issue take place in a variety of circumstances: on an expedition to a hidden valley in the Himalayas, in an encounter with a good Samaritan on a plane journey coming home from Korea, at an AA meeting in Santa Barbara, in a numinous moment on an island in the North Pacific, in the reveries that come while playing nocturnes on the piano, on retreat at a Zen center in the ...

“To hope means to be ready at every moment for that which is not yet born, and yet not become desperate if there is no birth in our lifetime.”   

Every bristling shaft of pride church or nation, team or tribe
Every notion we subscribe to is just a borderline. Good or bad, we think we know , as if thinking make things so! All convictions grow along a borderline...

...I recalled being taught to go outside in the gray dawn
before sunrise to receive blessings of gentle spirits
who gathered round our home. Go out, we were told,
get your blessings for the day

~Luci Tapahonso

At night make me one with the darkness
In the morning make one with the light

~Wendell Berry

Some people try to turn back their odometers. Not me. I want people to know why I look this way. I’ve traveled a long way and some of his roads weren’t paved.

~Will Rogers

When the snake decided to go straight, he didn’t get anywhere.

~William Stafford

The geographical pilgrimage is the symbolic acting out of an inner
journey. The inner journey is the interpolation of the meaning and
signs of the outer pilgrimage. One can have one without the other: it is best to have both.

~Thomas Merton

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