Late afternoon fence line, Brush Creek Ranch, Wyoming. Photo by Dawn Chandler When I was a teenager there were two places at home where I liked to do my homework. If I really needed to concentrate — say when writing a paper — I would work at my little desk in my tiny...
musings from the studio and beyond ~
dawn chandler’s reflections on art and life. . . .
autumn
lost and found in the [un]real world
Last year when I came crippled off my backpacking journey, I left the trail two weeks earlier than planned. The frugal thing to do would have been to change my travel plans and return promptly home to New Mexico. Fourteen days earlier and just five days into my Long...
returning to autumn in new mexico
I love Vermont and I miss it. Though not a physical resident, in the last couple of years I’ve become a resident of the soul of Vermont. I’ve so much more to reflect on and share about my long walk through the Green Mountain forests. But I am a physical and...
painting among lovebirds, enemies & johnny depp
A week ago my pup and I hiked up to one of our favorite spots high in the forest above Santa Fe. Take one of the major thoroughfares, then turn off onto a well-used ‘unofficial’ trail; after a ways cross a meadow; make your way through the far evergreen grove and...
falling, gratitude & why i want to return to the trail
It’s been two months now since I came off Vermont's Long Trail. I can finally descend the stairs in my own home without holding my breath and having to ease my legs down step by step. The golf-ball sized swelling over my left clavicle has abated. I can almost kneel...
where a walk across vermont ends
Where does a walk across Vermont end? I can’t tell you. But what I can tell you is where it does not end. It does not end on the first day in the first hour or two or three or four with gnats spinning dully in your eyes and ears during the greatest September heatwave...
where a walk across vermont begins
A northbound walk across Vermont begins with the first footstep upon the trail in Massachusetts. Well… No... really….that’s not quite right. Really, it begins a few moments earlier with you and your first friend in life—your friend of 49 years—embracing, choking down...
my walk across vermont
On September 9 of this year I set out to walk across Vermont. My passageway was The Long Trail, the oldest established long-distance hiking trail in the United States. Begun in 1910—two decades before the Appalachian Trail—it courses for 273 miles along the spine of...
enough already. time for taos.
ACK!! U N C L E! Enough with the computer already! A month of being glued to my keyboard — new website, new newsletter, dozens of paintings added to my online store, slew of emails vying for my attention — and I haven't painted since October! OCTOBER! So this morning...
my october: a mink, two moose and a baldy eagle
A mink, two moose and a baldy eagle. That's who I spent my October with. They, and seven of the best creative minds I could ever hope to meet. We were living at the mouth of a small valley, where the open range-land ripples as it abuts the nearby mountains,...