Ouray Yoga™

  408 Main St., Ouray  located down the steps in the Billy Goats courtyard. For more classes at the studio go to studioouray.com

The City, and the entire country, is one of the cleanest I have encountered in Latin America. Panama City is actually the only “First World” city south of the border. It has drinkable tap water throughout most of the country, and functioning water-treatment plants (something that Ouray is suffering for). Panama also provides public education, free health care, and I saw less homeless and litter than in L.A., or even Denver — all made possible by the capitalism of the Panama Canal. The Canal is an imperative supply chain between China, East/West US, and Europe. The Canal is so vitally important, the Chinese considered digging their own canal in a more authoritarian-friendly nation - but it proved too expensive. Which is substantive when you consider the passage fee is $1M per cargo ship. We hired a private tour of Panama through Viator . It was excellent. We walked through the Colonial old town, with many buildings still in use by the government, and many cathedrals. Two interesting t...

 This will not be my normal blog with all sorts of crazy activities to brag about. No, we did not scuba, or zipline, or helicopter over the city of Panama (although we thought about it). This vacation was probably the most quintessential beach cabana retreat most one-percenters luxuriously imbibe. (But you can do all that adventure stuff, plus a monkey island and sloth reserves.)  But first, per usual, the adventure begins way ahead of our arrival. It took us seventeen-and-a-half hours to get there — if you do not include food, gas, overnight with mom, and pee stoppage time.  Casa Azul Actually, it took the whole pandemic to get there. Our trip to Panama was originally schedule for Spring Break 2020 — when the World shut-down. Our booked vacation rental (thankfully) offered us a full refund, but Copa airlines only offered us a voucher. So, we waited. We watched our children stay-at-home, we watched the Distillery close-down. And then extended due to executive orde...

  An Interview with Award Winning Screenwriter and Film Critic  Christian D. Chapra Christian in Barcelona Christian D. Chapra has written since he was seven. The first time he was published was in high school. It was a poem. According to Chapra, “poems should be read, yes they are written, but they should be performed.” Carole Matthews, his English Lit teacher, published his poem -- by reading it to the staff and his peers. This is where his story began.   Two more poems would win contests in college, but critical recognition occurred in 2013, when he won “Best Unproduced Drama Screenplay” at the London International Filmmaker’s Awards for his screenplay: “Moving On.”  How would you describe the job of writing? CC: “Writing is an extremely tough job. At the end of the day, you are alone with a blank page. Nobody can really help you with it. You need to decide how you are going to deal with it. It is critical to any writer’s development that they learn there is...

 Please go to  EUCALYPTUS & ROSE * to see my Posthumous Epistolary Nature Piece, and my first publication! Season of Sunflowers To my Dearest M, You… I know not what I did to deserve the undying love you gave to me. If you are reading this, then I am gone, and you mourn. And you must mourn. It is as much a part of existence as a sunflower bows its stem; the weight of purpose bringing its petals towards the earth.  Remember that day, when you asked me to wear that sundress, a white and yellow gingham with billowy layers and embroidered knots, and my straw hat with matching ribbon. We went to see the newborn foal out at Green Mountain Ranch. On the way we passed a field of sunflowers bursting with golden pride against a bluebird sky. Their umber faces urging themselves taller than the scarecrow, following the sun as if worshippers to the solstice. Heliotropism, you called it.  You told me, on cloudy days the young blossoms will turn toward each other -- giving each...

“life imitates art far more than art imitates life” ~Oscar Wilde The Beautiful Lie I recently came across Oscar Wilde’s famous argument in the “Decay of Lying,” his belief “life imitates art far more than art imitates life” (Wilde n.d). I gathered from Wilde that what humans perceive as beautiful consummates life -- the sensual beauty of experience. I have been thinking about this Socratic dialogue, and its influence on me in reading Jane Hirshfield’s “Poetry, Permeability, and Healing.” One can surmise that beauty is “held in the eye of the beholder.” Wilde contends that all art is a lie, a perfected facsimile of nature; arguing an inverse relationship -- art as the original experience to natural beauty. Albert Goldbarth describes this effect in his poem “Human Beauty.” Art, poetry, life occurs when we mutually agree to acknowledge “what it was a praise of” (Goldbarth, 2004). The perception of art becomes integrated with the human experience; our experience determines our perception o...