Colorado's Children

You children born on this land wild and vast, bare-feet calloused, disheveled hair, rags, dirt, always that reddish dirt, you’re the lucky ones. Your forefather's campfires burn within you- spark- your lineage is life, full and hearty- flame- your stock is proud pioneer- smoke. Oh my children, on certain moonlit nights when, through the valleys and across the rolling hills, you hear the cantabile of the train whistle, the fiddle of its wheels on the track, the opus of its heavy load chugging along, when you smell the starlight in the caller of the Colorado air and you take a deep breath and feel the infinity of space stirring within your lungs, when you feel small and dizzy, when you breathe in and look about, when you breathe out and understand that the breadth of wilderness surrounding you is you, that the frost-shattered peak that made up your first horizon is you, that the rolling, capricious expanse of trees and rocks and wild is, all of it, you and you are it and it’s tangled and inevitable, it’s measureless and consuming, it’s elementarily simple and elegant. Oh my children, that's when you will begin to live! And the trees will no longer just be trees, nor the rocks rocks or the clouds clouds or you you, everything will be pregnant with meaning, with purpose, with will. This land called Colorado produces, dwelling unconsciously within all of us, a deep, deeper than the deepest mine shaft, soulful yearning, a powerful plea, a call to arms and adventure, a tug and pull, an undeniably necessary gravitational attraction towards all that is free, rebellious, untamed, towards all that is impossibly distant, high and buried, towards all that is unique, precarious and not recommended, towards all that is invisible, inopportune, and in-the-way. The yearning, the plea, the call, the tug. Oh my children, you providential sons and daughters of this wilderness, you are the valuable veins of gold that weave through the quartz and granite of normal existence, you have the precious strain of rebellion and reverie channeling through your souls, you dare to be what others can only dig for, you are the rarest of tellurides made up of concealed intellect, ruthless wit, instinctive awareness and feral resolve- this land is your land- oh my young ones, my lucky children, you will grow up with a mysterious sense of awe always hanging about- St. Elmo's fire, a mountain summit sunrise, a summer snowstorm, a crack of dry lightning, a looming gallows frame in the fog- you will befriend all of the animals, you will name the rocks and trees, you will follow the spring snowmelt and bathe in her bubbling pools, you will find the fragrant shade where the elusive herbs hide, you will have vast collections of fossils, bones and bird feathers, you will hear the distant Ute drum beat, feel its stir and heed its call. Oh passionate children, you are the lucky ones, you are the true bearers of verve, you are the archetypes, you are the kids who love life and whom life loves, you children can attain the heights of human zeal and confidence, you children have the esteem, wits and rarity necessary to be as untamed, striking, and enduring as the wildflowers- natures inherent impulse to emphasize beauty beyond strict necessity- that unfold themselves and spread across the endlessly reeling, fantastically fertile hillsides of a life lived fully.

Poem: "Colorado's Children" James Gagnon
Painting: Charles Partridge Adams "Spanish Peaks" Oil