Glory

The story goes this way--the great American novelist, Willa Cather, who called the red hills of south-central Nebraska home, was once told by a friend that her best work was going to originate in her own childhood world, the Great Plains of Nebraska.  That idea came as a shock to an aspiring writer who felt that, if she were to be a novelist, she'd have to mimic New York writers.

But she bought the idea, and we are the beneficiaries since O, Pioneers and My Antonia are among America's finest novels.  Both are set right there along the Nebraska/Kansas border, on the banks of the Republican River.

Some might say, however, that Cather's most impressive work is Death Comes for the Archbishop, a novel set far, far away in New Mexico.  Willa Cather was as enchanted with the dusky desert skylines, with the vastness, the forever expanse of New Mexico; but if you read the novel closely, it's fair to say and clear to the ready eye that certain lyrical passages of that novel, landscape descriptions, have the same feel as similar passages of her Nebraska work because it's perfectly clear that she was as taken with the landscape of New Mexico as she was with those undulant rolling hills of southern Nebraska.

We've been through a lot of the northern Great Plains on our tours, but we're about to embark on a wholly different tour of discovery, a look at the land Willa Cather loved, a land that's been the home to its pueblo residents for more than a thousand years. The Spanish were here long before the Pilgrims ever caught site of Plymouth Rock.  Mexico long ago staked its claim to the territory, but the whole region--in its endless vastness--has always belonged to its native people, the pueblo people and the Navajos.

We're aimed in a different direction, but we're going to learn what we can about a region the Great Plains-er Willa Cather loved just as stoutly as she did her own Nebraska home.

It's all of a piece, of course, all part of the quilt of natural beauty spun by a creator whose power and artistry and grace extends far beyond our imaginations.  Ought to be fun.  Ought to be, really--I'm serious--awesome.