I've been a lover and a leaver, a pretender and a defender...
These days, I survey the rich landscape of my lifelong wanderings in search of enlightenment. I am a gourmet who savors beauty and humor. I dive into the depths of re-invention. Though I waltz with my shadow in three-quarter time—I pirouette when confronted with pedestrian choices. The world’s stories, fairy tales, philosophies, poems, and puzzles inspire my lines. As the legendary songwriter and civil rights activist Nina Simone sang, “I’ve still got so terribly far to go.”
When the final curtain falls, after that last curtain call, don't expect me to exit stage left like most actors on the World's stages.
I'll leave my shadow with you--forever, still moving.
These days, I survey the rich landscape of my lifelong wanderings in search of enlightenment. I am a gourmet who savors beauty and humor. I dive into the depths of re-invention. Though I waltz with my shadow in three-quarter time—I pirouette when confronted with pedestrian choices. The world’s stories, fairy tales, philosophies, poems, and puzzles inspire my lines. As the legendary songwriter and civil rights activist Nina Simone sang, “I’ve still got so terribly far to go.”
When the final curtain falls, after that last curtain call, don't expect me to exit stage left like most actors on the World's stages.
I'll leave my shadow with you--forever, still moving.
Linda Durham’s professional and personal life centers on art, artists, global travel, and humanitarian causes. She is the founder and director of Santa Fe’s Wonder Institute, which sponsors art exhibitions, lectures, workshops, and salons focused on discovering and implementing creative solutions to contemporary social and cultural issues. For more than three decades, Durham promoted New Mexico-based artists as the hands-on owner of a contemporary art gallery with seven exhibition locations through the years: six in Santa Fe, and one in New York. In 2012, the New Mexico Museum of Art acquired her extensive gallery archives. A prolific writer and speaker, she has been guest lecturer or workshop presenter at Brigham Young University, the University of Wisconsin, Ohio Wesleyan University, Yale University, the Sundance Institute, the College of Santa Fe, Santa Fe Community College, and the New Mexico Museum of Art. For her seventieth birthday, Durham circumnavigated the world in seventy days, meeting Indigenous women, educators, artists, entrepreneurs, and peace activists, and planting “Seeds of Peace” in gardens, schoolyards, and parks in South Africa, Lesotho, Madagascar, Thailand, Myanmar, and Hawaii.
I have discovered and abandoned and rediscovered and lost and embraced—over time or in an instant—the fathomless distance from inclination to realization and the measureless proximity of the lost to the found.
Everything meets everything. Somewhere. This I choose to believe. In all things, there is connectedness. I envision a point where all manner of opposites intersect, collide, and explode. The persistent “same/opposite” notion that trails me, accompanies me, and leads me, has its roots in that afternoon vision. It is at those intersections where great energy occurs. Where stillness moves. Where fear exhibits bravery. Where anger dissolves into peace. Where emptiness is filled.
Where “One” becomes “The Other.”
Where life meets death and death gives rise to life.
Where “One” becomes “The Other.”
Where life meets death and death gives rise to life.