The snowtrees of Helene Wurlitzer

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These snowtrees were my companions, my protectors and my teachers during what for me was a very important winter, in 2007-08. I had just spent most of a year living among ex-patriats and native Kachiquel Mayans in a village on the shores of Lago de Atitlán, Guatemala. There I had shed much of my urban, career-obsessed, isolated urban identity and sunk deeply into unexplored, softer, more accepting and open parts of myself, all within a community I loved. I returned to Taos, New Mexico, that winter to be a Writer-in-Residence at the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, a portal into another world. At the Wurlitzer we were invited to do nothing but tend to our creative impulses–and if that meant you slept for all the months you were in residency because that’s what your creative soul needed, then so be it. All was permitted; all was accepted. I sold my car and walked beneath these trees and learned to tune into my internal creative rhythms with no interruptions. I talked to the spirit of Helene Wurlitzer, a strong, enlightened woman who had supported artists out of her love for them, with no strings attached, since becoming a permanent resident of Taos herself in the 1940s. I began important projects there, some of which have gone into the world and some of which I am still nurturing. And I communed with these snowtrees, whose beauty and radiance entered into and lit up the deep recesses of my psyche.