I don’t know, but I thought robots and AI would be just a perfect combination. What could go wrong?
Robots have been around for a long time. A really long time. You should look at the history of robots HERE. It’s a great review of some of the inventions through the ages considered to be part of the robot’s making. I like the Automatons the best. Very mechanical, clockwork mechanisms, especially the one’s that write and look a bit human. Check out Wikepedia’s story of them HERE. Okay, so the reason I’m writing this article is because a reader of the AI article mentioned the replacement of human jobs by AI. Since it’s already happening, and since robotics have been replacing humans for decades, I thought I’d poke around for some interesting things that have happened and I found one, in particular. One of my favorite YouTube science people had a video purported to be of an Elon Musk related robot. This particular beast was doing some things new to the humanoid robot world, and I thought I’d put that video HERE.
So what are some real world applications for robots taking away human jobs? Certainly the car industry has been using robotics for decades to help build automobiles. The mining industry has been using robotics as well, arguably, that one is great, but there are thousands of jobs lost to robots for people who may not readily be able to be retrained to do something else, and where would they do that something else anyway? It’s not like every mining town has a whole other industry for folks to work at.
Robots are entering the food production market. Watch this short Pizza video.
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~Cirrelda Snider-Bryan New Mexico Potters and Clay Artists Barbara Campbell currently serves as the Ceramic Arts Coordinator at Ghost Ranch Conference Center north of Abiquiu, NM. Here is the story of her life in clay and her work with it at Ghost Ranch. The Slip Trail: Tell the story of how you came to be a clay artist. Along with that, tell how you became a production potter living in El Rito, NM. Barbara Campbell: Between high school and college, I took a year long trip to Europe. At the time I spoke passable Spanish and enough French to get into trouble, but I really liked languages so off I went. While living in Paris I honed my French and started learning a bit of German. When I returned to attend college, I thought I would like to be a foreign diplomat, so I started taking Russian and going after my Bachelors, still fooling around with this direction. In my third quarter of college, I took a pottery class and got totally snagged. I think part of my decision to transfer to an art school was that my mother went to an art school in the Bay Area, and I had a boyfriend in the Bay Area so it was an easy decision to transfer. My education became very non-traditional very quickly. The boyfriend disappeared and I was sent by my college to a rural village in Mexico to help set up a branch campus there. It was an amazing experience and I learned to be more of a self-starter. We had to do everything without much mature adult supervision. It was a fabulous experience. I had to return for my final semester to the Oakland campus and there I worked with Viola Frey. Once out of school, I headed off to NYC and got a job teaching pottery at the Cooper Square Art Center. I only lasted about eight months in NYC before I felt I was completely losing myself. I took a three-day train ride back to San Francisco and joined the Berkeley Potters Guild and from there went full into production pottery. About this time the powers that be were demolishing all the old Victorian homes in Oakland and I started making little houses out of clay. This sort of took off and I got into all sorts of different styles of house replicas and fantasy castles and planters and it became very popular to the point I was supplying shops all over the country. I had patterns for certain styles so just started cranking out the work. Berkeley decided it needed the area where our guild was located for a redevelopment project. It never actually happened, but they gave us all about $2,000 to move. I used mine to invest in all the equipment I would need to set up my own studio. I had a friend who got the same and we moved into a caretaking position up in Jenner, and he helped me build a downdraft gas kiln before moving on to his own place up near Fort Bragg. I saved up my money that year and found a property I could afford in Sebastopol, CA. I lasted there for four and a half years when I was missing the mountains and blue skies of the Rockies where I had grown up. I sold my house and moved everything except my huge kiln to Boulder, Colorado where I had grown up. I couldn’t find what I was looking for anywhere in Colorado, but I had an opportunity to drive a friend to New Mexico. I did a search when I got here in early 1978. I found and house in El Rito and made an offer on it that was accepted. I moved from Boulder on Easter weekend of that year. About a week after setting up my studio, I met a guy right here in El Rito and we were married about a year later. His property and my house were really inconveniently located so after a big show, I had enough money for us to go together and buy a property in the middle of town. We had this town property and the property up the Potrero canyon. I built a studio up there and had the one in town so we were able to come back and forth while raising our son. The town property was crucial for when he started going to school. Meanwhile when my son was about three years old, I can remember hating making these stupid little cookie cutter houses and one morning I woke up and decided I would never make another little #%$* house. I got my wheel out and started honing my throwing skills. I had been fascinated with the Mimbres culture from the moment I got to NM. I wasn’t able to find a lot of information about them and the two or three books that were out there all seemed to contradict one another. I started collecting their very graphic wonderful designs. About this time, I had to paint my window frames and doors on the house we had bought in town and my neighbors said I had to use this certain color of teal as it was what would keep the brujos away. So here I am an Anglo living in a Hispanic community thinking about using Native American designs on my pottery. As I was designing this line of work, I needed to get the Hispanic element into the dinnerware I was preparing to make. I worked on the blue slip recipe from Daniel Rhode’s book until I got a really deep lovely teal. Now I had the tri-cultural intention working for me. The Slip Trail: I remember you selling your pottery at Ghost Ranch in the 1990s at the local craft market held on Friday evenings. What was that like? Barbara Campbell: Somewhere around the mid 80’s I started selling my work at the Mercado on Friday evenings at the Ghost Ranch. It was a captive audience and very lucrative. That is what I spent my summers doing every Friday evening for about ten weeks per summer. I did American Craft Council shows as well as small local shows and managed to make a reasonable living. The Slip Trail: You were hired for the Ghost Ranch ceramics education coordinator position in the early 2000’s, was that first year a full schedule? As you come close to teaching there 20 years, what has changed? Barbara Campbell: I wasn’t hired, I was asked to volunteer. Around 2004, Jim Kempes, who was the Arts Coordinator and main ceramic artist running Pot Hollow at the Ranch, decided to go into grade school teaching and left the Ranch. I had been on the board that runs the Mercado at the Ranch and I was asked to take over the Ceramic Arts department. By that summer or the next, I started teaching several classes during Festival of the Arts. Soon I was teaching Jan Term as well. When asked if I would be coordinator for the ceramic arts program, I wanted to know what it involved. They said, “A lot of work and no money.” I said, “Sure, why not.” There was an Interim director named Mary Ann Lundy. Judy Nelson-Moore and I actually initiated doing some renovations with Pot Hollow. We went to Mary Ann Lundy and made a proposal that we have a volunteer camp. And so we did. That was the beginning of V-camps. First of all, all the wheels were on tiny pads of cement that were sticking up and one would trip over them all the time. If you dropped a tool it went into the dirt or the sand and if you didn’t pick it up right away it got stepped on or lost. It was pretty funky down there in Pot Hollow. So, the Potters Association raised enough money to pour a slab and that was the beginning. Then, there was this program coordinator named Jim Baird. I had been told the best way to approach him if you wanted anything was to kind of come in from the side, so he felt like it was his idea in the end. So, I kinda got good at that. There was no cover over the two raku kilns and trolley kiln. You know the tubes that ran the gas were in the sun. In the winter they were in the snow. We suggested that the Ranch put up a pavilion roof. And they did, that was the result – the Ranch paid for that. The Potters Association raised enough money to do the cement. Then Potters raised enough money for half of the big gas kiln, the West Coast 24 cubic foot gas kiln. The Slip Trail: The one that’s there today? Barbara Campbell: Yeah, just got repaired this year. It’s now functioning perfectly well with one glitch, that’s just a get-it-going glitch, the electronic ignition doesn’t actually work because the striker doesn’t work, so somebody has to be there to do the switches while somebody’s under the kiln with a torch. There are eight burners. You just have to keep working at getting it going. The gas doesn’t seem to flow well at first. But once it gets lit it works, it goes up to cone 10, in 6-8 hours. Almost every year after that, we did a volunteer camp where the potters would come and renovate, repair and take inventory. One year we had this woman named Judith Baker who took the class and really loved it. Her husband was quite wealthy and he made a nice donation to us. I asked him if he would buy these Advancer shelves for us because I was getting to the point where lifting heavy things into the back of the kiln was becoming too hard for me. There was a potter in El Rito who was going out of business. He had 16 of these shelves, and he sold them to us for $1200, which is a third of what they would cost new. We now have all these lovely Advancer shelves compliments of the Baker’s. So, it turned out, somewhere in the 90s, somebody else made a donation. It could have been the Bakers. I can’t remember. But anyway, I didn’t know about it until this year. Apparently, what the Ranch did in the meantime was to invest it, earmarked for the ceramic arts program. It has now earned to around $28,000. Then Debra Hepler came along and she was there ten years. Tom Nichols who ran the welding department wanted to put together a Peace Garden in honor of Barbara Schmidtzinsky, Archivist and Assistant Program Director, who had recently lost her battle with cancer, and Ed Delair, Program Director, who had died suddenly of a heart attack. From the patio at Headquarters, you can’t really see the Peace Garden down at Lower Pavilion, so we had the idea that if we put a mural that reflected those Fibonacci spirals in the Peace Garden, it would draw people down to the Peace Garden. Dean Schroeder, Tomas Wolff, Judy Nelson-Moore, and I got together to plan it out. Judy and I did the design and decal work -- Judy, Dean and I did the tile work. Then Tomas and Dean installed it with the help of Tom Nichols and some help from me and Judy. We had this tiny little 12 by 18” slab roller and it was not big enough. Michael Walsh who lives in Santa Fe had a 4' by 24" Brent Roller and he was willing to sell it to the ranch for $800. It was in new like condition and Debra gave me permission to have the Ranch buy it for us. We sold the little one to Mountainair for 100 bucks which went back to the Ranch. The Slip Trail: I would say 800 for a huge slab roller, that’s a great price. Barbara Campbell: That’s what I told her. Debra got to the point where I would start walking up to her and she would kinda go like this [hands up] and go, “How much is this gonna cost me?” I would say, “Well, not too much!” Anyway, she was very helpful for getting equipment we needed for pulling things together. I had this big wood fire kiln up in Potrero. The reason I built it up there was because we always had these piles of brush that needed to be burned. It was oak, it was the wrong fuel for a kiln. I could never get up to cone 10 -- it was just like really, really difficult. The oak would make clinkers, you know it would make coals, then it would stall the kiln and I would have to rake the clinkers out and get the fire going. So, I just quit firing it. And at one point, after Terry died, Colin said, “Mom, what do you want to do with this kiln?” I said, “I want to move it to Ghost Ranch.” So, we got several people together, there were 6 or 7 of us. We took that kiln apart. Loaded it onto the Low Boy trailer, and made two trips over to the Ranch. It was way too heavy for one trip. I offered a course on “How To Build a Wood Fired Kiln.” We had four students - two of them were not pulling their weight, the other two were really into it. I had to keep taking stuff apart and rebuilding it. It was somewhat frustrating; however, in a week’s class we rebuilt that kiln. So, I decided it needed four feet more stack. One of the reasons it wasn’t firing correctly was because the stack wasn’t high enough. I went down to Santa Fe Steel (the Potters Association raised the money for this, I think it was 400 or 800 – I can’t remember --somewhere under $1000). Then my son rented a cherry picker, and my brother-in-law and my son brought the cherry picker and installed it on top of the other piece that we already had in place. We now had 11 feet of stack. I had previously fired it once or twice with a few people and we were just stoking and stoking it, it was insane and it was hard. It was also very aerobic. I still wasn’t happy with the way the temperature was so uneven. So, I called Betsy Williams and she said, “I will come over and help you.” We were getting mill ends from Moore’s Lumber Company, so when the guys from the Ranch would take the recycle into Espanola, they would stop at Moore’s and pick a couple of these huge bundles for 30 bucks, deliver them to the Ranch. Potters Association people would come saw it up into two-foot pieces. There was lots and lots of firewood. Well, for two-fifths of a cord of wood, cut into two-foot pieces, Betsy showed me how to fire the kiln gently. When the pyrometer started to go back down, you throw two pieces in and it will keep going down, and then it will start going up a little higher. The minute it would start to come down again, throw two more pieces in. It was so civilized and it was so easy, and could easily be done with just two people. We didn’t need four teams of people to take turns, we just needed a couple people in an easy chair or two out there, and some lemonade or cold water. It worked beautifully. We got to cone 10 in 8 hours and it was fabulous. With this technique, we did two or three workshops. We could go from clay to wood-fired, finished pieces in less than a week. It was amazing. The Slip Trail: I am so glad this story is being told. To be continued Next week ...
By Tamra Testerman Inspired by Georgia O’Keeffe and her painting ‘Blue River,’ late last spring, I joined Far Flung Adventures, a local rafting company for nearly half a century, on a three-day adventure down the Rio Chama. The trip begins in high alpine woodlands and flows 32 miles in the heart of Georgia O’Keeffe country ending at the head of Abiquiu reservoir, a stone’s throw from her home. We met at Bode’s Mercantile and General Store, the Abiquiu landmark known for providing “service to travellers, hunters, pilgrims, stray artists and bandits since 1893.” After stocking up on nibbles and libations, we boarded a van for the launch point at Cooper’s El Vato Ranch on the rural outskirts of Tierra Amarilla. There was not much conversation on the way – The land tends to dominate with its scruffy beauty. After a flawless launch, we made our way down river serenaded by Canada geese to a muddy bank lined with red willows, and Ponderosa Camp our overnight bivouac site. We pitched tents in a meadow nestled in a grove of sappy vanilla scented Ponderosa, intermingled with the pungent camphor of juniper and sage and occasional pile of musky bear, rabbit and elk scat. There was no cell phone service, no way out except by a river flowing at a brisk 3500 cubic feet per second. Too fast for this swimmer, though I managed to wade to the edge of the surf one morning, tethered to a red willow branch for a very ‘cold plunge.’ On the first night we slept in the eerie light of a penumbral lunar eclipse. And you could feel wildlife nearby, coyotes howling, echoing in the canyon. There is a rich legacy of artists interpreting the remote landscape surrounding O’Keeffe’s homes overlooking the Chama River Valley. The winding 135-mile Rio Chama is a tributary of the Rio Grande begins from high alpine headwaters of the glaciated San Juan Mountains in southern Colorado. The dramatic beauty crescendos with the Rio Chama’s bone bleached sandstone, siltstone, and gypsum cliffs carved by wind and time, now homes for nesting birds and wildlife. Our river guide, Elyssa Clement, confirmed the elevation and presence of water make for a mixed desert fauna — “Cottonwood for large specimens, a few firs and spruce here and there too. Juniper, red willows, box elder, hackberry and willows. It’s a mixed desert overall. Geologically, it’s a part of the Colorado Plateau. The most prominent layers we were seeing in the wilderness section of the Rio Chama include Dakota Sandstone, which occurs during the end of the Cretaceous period. Beyond that, starting from the Monastery of Christ in the Desert, we move deeper in geologic time with the exposed Mancos Shale at the beginning of the Triassic.” Moving from one geological time zone to the next, stratocumulus clouds slung low overhead, bathed in a mercurial light, we were immersed in O’Keeffe’s color palette; cerulean and cobalt blues, raw umber, silver white, alizarin crimson and viridian green. The banks were lined with stalwart cottonwoods, and willow, and pine trees veering off in angles. There were beavers coasting along. And we spotted herons, kingfishers, swallows, and warblers. And geese racing overhead, skidding into the river and taking off. If there was a soundtrack for this adventure, it would be geese honks in the morning, crackle of campfire, and sound of the night wind in the trees. And our guide’s river navigation lesson. – (have a listen below.) Video Credit Tamra Testerman
After three days on an explorative journey through a painting, I gained a profound understanding of the muse in O’Keeffe’s ‘Blue River’ and what moved her to harness the power and beauty of the Rio Chama with the potency of her brush and oil paints. By Brian Bondy
I talked about AI last week, and I had some more thoughts about it. Some great things AI is already working in is science. AI is used to work on genetics, to help solve puzzles of not only illnesses but their cures, and of course in space study. Back at home, my immediate sarcastic response is, “and what could possibly go wrong?” Well, everything, of course. That’s how humans are though, and we haven’t caused the end of the world... yet. AI will likely continue to bring great things to life, just like GE. And just like GE, they will also make some destructive things. Having Henry Fonda hawk their products was a good choice. Who doesn’t love Henry Fonda? Elon Musk hawking AI is a bad choice. In fact, I’m sure someone could come up with an AI commercial hosted by Henry Fonda, using AI. I digress, but only a bit. I found an article about the 15 most dangerous concerns of an AI world. What? Only 15? That’s a start. Don’t get me wrong, I think AI is a great thing. Potentially. The only problem, like guns, is that humans have access to them. Remove the human participation and we’re all just dandy. That, of course, is what the Terminator movie was about. You could argue the same thing for nuclear energy too. That was a topic of the movie Oppenheimer. It was also a discussion I had with my friend Grizz. Ultimately, are we humans mature enough, individually or as a populace, to have weapons, of any kind? Are we ready for AI? If not, how do we get ready, because it’s here. Read this great article on the 15 Biggest Risks of AI and note that neither Siri nor Alexa was mentioned once. Click to Read Fool's Gold
~Zach Hively So this’ll teach me to be efficient: I was being so very on top of things the other day. Like, I had run all the errands I really had to, like getting groceries and stopping for a latte, and I decided—in lieu of going home, where I like to be very much to swing by the dry cleaners, drop off my one real suit, and see if they had any clothes of mine that I had forgotten about. This is the danger with dry cleaners. They, in my experience, do not hound me to come get my winter coat or my comforter or either of my nice shirts. Nor do they appear to take my clothes home for themselves within, say, three to five years. They just … store my clothes for me, free of extra charge, on those cool conveyor-belt clothes racks, until I show up on a particularly efficient day, figure out which false phone number they have on file for me (because I hate getting automated marketing messages like “Save 15% this weekend” or “Your items are ready for pickup”), and take home what feels like brand-new outfits for the low low price of what I paid for them at the thrift store in the first place. Such was my state of mind—total #bossbabe—sitting at a red light shortly after leaving the dry cleaners. I felt accomplished. On top of things. Soon to be well-attired. Then I felt rear-ended. This is largely because I was, in fact, rear-ended. In the other driver’s defense, the light had indeed turned green. I saw it. The driver in front of me saw it. The driver in front of him saw it. But none of us had yet ACTED on it when the woman behind me did. “I thought you were going,” she summarized, “but you didn’t.” We pulled to the turn lane where we could inconvenience the greatest number of other drivers while walking around each other’s cars and rubbing the backs of our own necks. She said this was her first accident, which I am inclined to believe, because a more experienced rear-ender would know to have one current registration in the vehicle instead of two dating from different administrations in the 2010s. She would also have an up-to-date discount insurance card instead of texting someone to Photoshop her one real quick. I didn’t call the police or file a report, because the last time I called the police for a non-emergency incident they ultimately told me to go home, and then they called me at 2 a.m. to talk about submitting photographs by 4 a.m., and quite frankly we are all lucky I didn’t get arrested at 2:15 a.m. that night. Besides, it’s all good. I, having come of driving age in New Mexico, know to carry excellent uninsured motorist coverage. In such a seemingly minor bumper-bender as this, I am confident that my automotive repairs and personal bodywork will both fall well short of my deductible. I cannot be certain, however. Lawyers from network television shows have advised me not to make public claims about my wellbeing until I have been thoroughly assessed by medical professionals who stand to make much more money if they declare that I may need months of rehabilitation and—I hope—therapeutic massages. The problem here is that, whatever my dry cleaning adventure has you presuming to the contrary, I am really, really busy. Like, I am too busy to understand why, exactly, I am so busy. I’ve officially reached the stage in life where the worst thing about an auto accident—even worse than the thought of lifelong whiplash symptoms—is the inconvenience. This factor is intensified because everyone else is even busier. My medical providers can’t book me for three weeks. The earliest the body shop in bed with my insurance company can fit me in for a damage appraisal is a month out. And I’m taking my legal advice from TV. And all this because I deviated from my norm—because I went against my true nature—because I decided to Be Responsible and do One More Thing While I’m Out Anyway. You’ll never see me making THAT mistake again. In fact, I now possess a sound excuse for never running errands ever again, except for getting lattes. I hope my dry cleaner gets good use out of that three-piece suit. An afternoon with Dexter Trujillo By Jessica Rath Not many people, myself included, would call their life beautiful, without reservation. Maybe after thinking about it for a while – yes, I agree, it IS beautiful. But often life throws frustrating and annoying stuff at us which dominates the way we feel and overshadows the beauty. When I met with Dexter Trujillo at the Abiquiú Library he totally convinced me that his life is indeed beautiful. And I learned that his life has its share of frustrating and annoying, even sad, events. However, these events don’t cast a pall on his basic outlook. Here is an example: in May, he visited his sister Margo who lives in Minnesota. While there, he did the 21-mile-long Walk to Mary – a pilgrimage to the National Shrine of our Lady of Champion in Wisconsin. Dexter had to explain: this is the only site in the United States where the Catholic church recognizes an apparition of Mary. She appeared to Sister Adele (or St. Adele) in 1859 and told her to teach the young children, often orphans. “There were 4,000 pilgrims, it was so beautiful. But it was freezing! But we made it; I don't know how we made it. We started at six in the morning. And it went until 5:30 pm. We had an ending mass at 5:30. But we almost froze! I just couldn't walk anymore. I could barely kneel, I couldn't even think! Maybe 20 years ago, yes, I could have done it. But now – I can do the pilgrimage from Abiquiú to Santa Rosa de Lima, but no more than that!” Dexter laughs. “It was like a blizzard! The whole way it rained down. The wind was awful and had the rain pour into your face. But it was beautiful. You know, 4000 people, youngsters and not not so young and average people in all kinds of walks of life and so beautiful that there's that devotion. We had an outdoor mass and it was packed. I wanted to get souvenirs but I couldn't even walk to the shop anymore. I walked in the church and prayed the rosary and then we went down into the crypt, where they have an image of the Blessed Mother. You know, the Peshtigo Fire (which happened the same day as the Great Chicago Fire) extended all the way to that place in Wisconsin right there. They say that Sister Adele got all the people on their knees, and they went on their knees around the chapel. And they had a wooden fence and the fire spread to just the wooden fence. It stopped right there. And all the people were unharmed. That’s how deep their faith was. So I'm glad I went and it was beautiful. It reminds me a lot of here too because we just had our annual Santa Rosa de Lima Fiesta.” I should point out here that I’m not affiliated with any organized religion, and in general, my views are rather dim on the subject. But Dexter’s sincerity and devotion, his genuine desire to help people and to make the world a better place, impressed me deeply. He dedicates every moment of his life to follow the teachings of his religion, the teachings of Jesus Christ, as well as he can. This is unusual and quite remarkable. U.S.Postal Service in 1902. The library has many historic photographs. Image credit: Jessica Rath Dexter showed me around the library, and then we went across the Plaza and entered the church of Santo Tomás el Apostol, Saint Thomas the Apostle. It was built around 1935. Here is an interesting anecdote from its early days: “The wealthy people lived towards the highway, the current highway. And the church was really the work of the hermanos and penitentes, they were doing all the backbreaking labor, also the women and children. Anyway, they found out that the pueblo was going to get the back end of the church. And the church was already four feet high. When the people realized that they were going to get the back of the church facing the pueblo, they came with their axes and with their plows and they plowed everything down. They said if we're getting the back of the church, then we don't want a church here in Abiquiú. So anyway, what happened was that the people said we will have our church but we want the face toward the pueblo, to our side. Because they were doing all the work.” “There's pictures at the library of the old church. The only reason they had to destroy that church was because the adobes weren't tight together. So the walls started to separate.” We spent some time in the church, and Dexter pointed out various paintings, images, and weavings. People with a sick family member would make a promise: they’d weave a tapestry if the person got well again. There’s a lot of local history embedded in the church, and the knowledge of this cultural tradition, of the history going back several generations, enriches Dexter’s life and gives it meaning and significance. After our visit to the church Dexter invites me to have a look at his garden. “In my garden I grow my own chile, my own vegetables, tomatoes, pinto beans, I plant a little bit of everything, even Zinnias. We have apricots, apples, grapes, plums – you name it. We have our apricot tree that’s over 300 years old. It has sweet almonds, they say that if you eat the almonds of that tree you won’t get cancer.” First, though, I want to admire the big horno that he built himself. The bricks are made from the soil around Abiquiú. And then we visit the chickens. Dexter opens a gate to let them out of their coop; they happily run around and enjoy their freedom. At night they’ll return to their shed to be safe from coyotes and racoons. We walk through the vegetable garden to go to the almond tree, and Dexter picks a few ripe tomatoes and little round cucumbers for me. It is obvious that his life is strongly connected to the soil, to the natural spring that flows close by, to the apple trees that his grandfather planted, and of course to the magnificent apricot tree. “When my grandpa was alive, he told us that he would ask his great-grandpa how old this tree was. And his great-grandpa would say that it was already a tree when he was a little boy. So it must be at least 300 years old.” As somebody who has changed locations all her life, I ponder: what must it feel to have deep roots to one’s past? Our last stop is the Morada de Alto, the true center of Dexter’s life. I always thought that los Hermanos Penitentes was a secretive society who don’t welcome any outsiders, but this is completely wrong, according to Dexter. He calls them sacred places where people should feel at home, that unite people, where everybody is cared for. He compares them to kivas: a space for gatherings. When the land here still belonged to Mexico, many of the smaller settlements and pueblos were without a priest. It was the laity, the hermanos penitentes, the brothers that kept Catholicism alive. “ The Morada is like a retreat center, a house of prayer. It’s for everybody, you don’t have to be Catholic to attend. But this is where we learn about our Catholicism. This is where we've learned the doctrine of the Church. This is where we really dissect the information and pass it along to the community as best as we know how. This is really laity. A lot of people think that this is where the priests lived, or this is where the priests recite, and it's not, it’s laity. It's both men and women, we get together and we pray every Friday throughout the year, every second Friday here. This is called La Morada D’Alto. It is dedicated to Nuestra Señora Santa Dolores which means the house of Our Lady of Sorrows.” It was deeply touching to meet somebody so open, so ready to share some aspects of his life with a stranger. His long practice of serving the community, of helping other people, of dedicating his life to creating a peaceful and better world gives him a presence that one can feel strongly. Thank you, Dexter, for a beautiful afternoon.
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