It amazes me how little our looks change over the years. This was taken on the 4th of July in 1968.  That year trouble was brewing with North Korea, King and Kennedy were assassinated, Boeing launched the 747, and the American flag orbited our moon aboard the Apollo 8.  (BTW - Hidden Figures - the movie - rocked.)

My family was vacationing in Arizona.  I don't remember this, but the batch of pictures, received this week, show that we were camping out.  I do remember bears coming into our camp once and my dad scooping me up and rushing all of us into the fire engine red station wagon.  I remember them rummaging around our things and moving on - not even a twinkie crumb to be had around our area.  My dad was a stickler for a tidy campsite.  Arizona was one of my parent's favorite destinations and we spent a lot of time exploring the natural beauty of the State.  I'd love to go back to visit several of those places adding Roden Crater to the long list. 

I think it was at the Petrified forest where  a tree had fallen across a gorge ... I might have been six or so when I first read the sign there: Cowboys road their surefooted horses across this natural bridge.  Something like that.  Definitely surefooted (because I didn't know what that meant and had to ask), definitely cowboy on horse back.  I shivered at their confidence imagining the Lone Ranger and Tonto. 

The sign there says Sitgreaves National Forrest ... not near the Petrified Forest or The Grand Canyon where I first thought of being in an airplane.  I wasn't allowed to make the tourists flight with my older brother. I still remember my dad insisting that he would be allowed to go on that flight with our grandparents while my mother insisted I would not be.  I remember watching the plane get tiny.  

Blessed with lots of sweet memories and the wish to see many of those places all over again.  This time I'll probably make the flight! 

“I always wanted to make a light that looks like the light you see in your dream. Because the way that light infuses the dream, the way the atmosphere is colored, the way light rains off people with auras and things like that...We don't normally see light like that. But we all know it. So this is no unfamiliar territory - or not unfamiliar light. I like to have this kind of light that reminds us of this other place we know.”  Turrell

“I was maybe 5 or 6, and my grandmother would begin sitting me in the Quaker meeting house. I asked my grandmother, 'What am I supposed to do?' and she said, 'Just wait, we're going inside to greet the light.' I liked that—this idea to go inside to find that light within, literally as well as figuratively.”  Turrell