A week in Temecula, one rich, round, green and earthy week in the mountains and summer heat...this is the life - standing here, where the great mother rises up, lifts as high as any eye might travel and fills whatever desire there might be to roam.

The womanly warmth flourishes, embellished with beautiful roundness,  the very fullness of her shapely mounds and above, everywhere was blue;  Blue sky, blue mist and the precise, fresh, clear blue mother atmosphere of healing. A Turner-Manet-Monet blue landscape.

I dipped my toes into the cool, soul-touching, sole-tingling impasto scene... the deep earth the spirit yearns to memorize and colorize in a future dream. 

This nurturing place, this sanctuary, where the great mother births curvaceous mountains that curve into mountains and more mountains - that form continual living, breathing rhythms - symphonies of movements that raise a sleepy soul from the depths and carries it gently into gracious dreams of the greatest height and breadth.

The silent, somber symphonies of Great Mother's magnificent songs collect dew-like beneath agile and elegant wings of red hawks, eagles and  melodies that reverberate and resound throughout and over unattended avocado fields.

I supplicate and praise the colours, curves and lines, I write each word and verse by heart and applaud these grand performances with my desert bones.

I walk about in this wild, blue beauty, implore my salient self, to lift and linger among the orchard fruits, the greening grapes, avocados, sage, the limes of citrus groves and I become drunk with vineyards - breathless with the delicate blush of rosy pomegranates.

The gnarled roots of banana trees pen esoteric poems. I entwine and write the verses of leaves, tie them to the branches of the Great Spirit tree and hang fearless, prickles of pain on the newly budding pink and yellow blossoms of cacti
and succulent plants.

My fortitude is restored, I hunger less. My earthy flesh blooms rejuvenated. I am a peaceful infant cradled in mountainous arms.

Deborah Russell, © 2004


I had the pleasure of meeting and speaking with Chief Reynard Farber, at the National Powwow. He is a Christian and is an honorary Chief of the Apache, from the Jicarilla Apache Tribe in Dulce, New Mexico, who has appeared, as a public speaker, with Evangelist, Billy Graham.