I finally landed. Just now.

It was barely a month ago that Ellen and I were sipping Singapore Sling with my little sister Ruiling on the beach in Singapore. We were also taking turns burping my little 2 month old niece Yi Qing. We were tromping through Little India shopping for bracelets and cheap suitcase, eating real prata and lamb masala in our t-shirts and flip-flops, having no concept whatsoever of being “cold”. We left winter behind. Far far behind. Great food, warm weather, loving family and adoring friends. Why did I return to the land of ice and snow and big mountains?

Right after we got off the plane, yours truly then climbed into the BAS-Mobil and went on a 10-day tour of the south eastern part of USA. We drove 24 hours straight to our first gig in Charlotte. 9 days and 13 shows later, we bid farewell to the wonderful Ms Rooster’s Wife, Janet Kenworthy and her family and drove straight home to Denver.

BAS had a couple of local shows after we came back. We played the Swing Station in La Porte for the first time and played Bongo’s again last Saturday. Clark cleared out tables and chairs so people could get up and boogie. What a fun night! But I was a little disappointed to not see my friends, Chelsea and Kyndra in the crowd.

I did however reconnect with David Bright who I have met last time BAS played in Salida. He had told me briefly about what’s going down in the Crestone Valley, about their fight against the invasion of oil and gas company. We had talked about how I can use my music to help support the cause. More on that later. For those of you who don’t know about Crestone, here is a couple of articles to get you started.

You can learn more about Crestone’s incredible spiritual presence and environmental struggles here:
http://www.usnews.com/features/news/sacred-places/sacred-places.html
http://travel.nytimes.com/2008/01/11/travel/escapes/11crestone.html?scp=1&sq=crestone&st=nyt
–Article from the Crestone Paper (see the main article on the page)
http://www.crestoneeagle.com/

Tonight we held a discussion group at the Brooks Center for Spirituality to brainstorm ideas of how we can help Crestone win it’s battle against Lexam. As I looked around the room, I saw like-minded, intelligent, caring and thoughtful people; more than half of them are my dear friends and colleagues in the arts. The other half are people I met for the first time tonight. Nonetheless, we were all there tonight because we cared. And I thought to myself: This, is why I came back to Colorado.