A Morningstar Romance

I sent off copies of the manuscript of A Morningstar Romance to Larry Read and Pam Hanna, as promised. It is essentially what I posted on this site but I cleaned up the typos and grammar as best I could and will be submitting it to be published upon their review. I enjoyed writing it and reliving those magical months from February until June of 1970 on the high plateau that was cut through by the Rio Grand north of the town of Taos New Mexico. I wasn't  there very long at all chronologically but it was as though I'd passed a lifetime on the mesa at Morningstar and it was a memory that was beginning to fade before I wrote the novel, A Time Ago and Then. I also thought that some of these people might still be around and hoped that they would enjoy reading the experience of light and joy from one of the those who merely passed through Morningstar East.

     It was in trying to build a model of The Kiva that inspired me to write this memoir and it was in seeking out photos of Morningstar New Mexico that I made contact with Pam Hanna (Read). This was one of those serendipitous things because, unknown to me at the time, it was her then husband, Larry Read, that came up with the design for the Kiva. My model shows eight timbers but I was to find out from Pam that it was actually ten timbers that made up the self-supporting architecture of the roof. The hole it covered was dynamited out of the hard soil and then the tiers were dug out by hand below an adobe brick wall of a few feet that circled the hole. The wall had placed in it windows made of wine bottles planted there for stained glass lighting that made the Kiva a small cathedral. A non-supporting pole with steps cut in it went through the hole at the center of the roof to the ground for entering and exiting.

     There are plenty pics of the shelters in the original Morningstar West in Sonoma County but I still have not been able to find many pictures of the pueblo, or magical Kiva, at Morningstar New Mexico. Though I have a good memory of the Kiva, I only have a vague idea of how the actual pueblo was laid out in detail other than it was a triangle arrangement with about three rooms in each wing. One wing on the north side stood alone but the two other wings were joined in a sideways V with the south wing positioned east/west. In the midst of these was a small plaza where the grain grinder became the communal place to pick up on whatever was going on. There was also an adobe oven outside...maybe twenty feet to the north and on the east side of the pueblo where flat-breads and so on were baked. I am hoping someone will help me round out this short memoir before I go to publishing it.

     I call this memoir a romance because, in on sense, it is a love story. In another more classical concept of a romance it is a faded looking back to an ideal memory. It is painterly romantic for the beauty and powerful landscape it all takes place in. It romanticizes the people to some degree because I remember so little that I give only a glazed over perspective of their most positive qualities in my memoir. I do so because I've heard enough about the negative aspects of communal attempts at creating an alternative social and spiritual reality. The influence of psychedelic drugs, the misuse and positive use of them, had to be touched on, however, because so much that drove us all to the high mesa above Arroyo Hondo had to do with a spiritual quest that opened our minds via LSD and other mind-altering natural substances. The negativity of my own alcoholism was featured too because I felt the need to explain why I couldn't stay there and had to move on. It is all covered in this blog that I used as a rough draft.