Georgia O’Keeffe in Shadow & Light

Rainbow Warriors in the Desert Southwest

In 1961, Georgia O’Keeffe, with photographer Todd Webb and his wife Lucille and a dozen other friends, went on a ten-day raft trip down the Colorado River to Glen Canyon, Utah. After the trip, Webb presented O’Keeffe with an album of photographs from their shared experience. With his camera focused on the artist, he also framed the extraordinary beauty of the canyons accessible only on the water. O'Keeffe and Webb met in 1946 and were lifelong friends. (Post shared by Judith Shaw Beatty)

Photographs of Georgia O’Keeffe intrigue me. They stir emotions and conjure memories. A few years after O’Keeffe died in 1986, I stayed at the house of shadow and light called Sol y Sombra in Santa Fe, where she spent her final days. In the shadow of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, in the adobe home that became her last residence, the spirit of Georgia O’Keeffe paid me a visitation.

Two summers before O’Keeffe’s death, she moved from her remote desert adobe home at the edge of Ghost Ranch near Abiquiu to Sol y Sombra in Santa Fe, where her private nurse, Anastasia Savage, cared for her. Anastasia’s western romance with singer-songwriter Dan Fogelberg made her his second wife. You may remember Anastasia from the gorgeous song he wrote about her called Anastasia’s Eyes from his The Wild Places CD. Fogelberg also wrote the stirring music Bones in the Sky as a tribute to Georgia O’Keeffe, released on the same album. Fogelberg saw his life mirrored in that of O’Keeffe’s – her dedication to spirit, her art, and her commitment to the wild places.

I sing to your spirit where all my dreams dwell. The vision—the freedom, the life lived so well. And I sing in your canyons and the echoes ring clear. And I wish somehow you may still hear. —Bones in the Sky, Fogelberg, from The Wild Places

In 1987, Beth and Charles Miller purchased the O’Keeffe property from Georgia O’Keeffe’s estate and created Sol y Sombra as a flourishing twenty-acre organic farm, residence, and institute. Beth states, “We grow flowers, food, people, and ideas,” encapsulating the inspiring and hopeful spirit of community, growth, and sustainable development.

Hawksong, a friend of the Millers and a fellow songwriter invited me to Sol y Sombra and to attend the Rainbow Warrior Music Festival in August 1990 as her guest in Santa Fe. The festival called for the healing of the earth and for our children and their future. Produced by Eliza Gilkyson, who wrote Song of the Rainbow Warrior based on Navajo, Hopi, and Seneca traditions, the festival celebrated the fact that we are all brothers and sisters uniting in the Fifth World of Illumination.

Many music festival participants, Hawksong and I, would stay at Sol y Sombra. She knew I was broke trying to make a living as a musician and couldn’t afford to go to Santa Fe. Still she insisted that the music festival would benefit my career and footed the bill. It was an honor, and I stayed for a week.

Sol y Sombra Greenhouse

Medicinal plants grew near the elegant adobe main house. The library had been O’Keeffe’s bedroom, with rosewood love seats and Anatolian and Russian kilims. Rebar-reinforced, straw-bale enclosures filled with organic matter slowly turned kitchen leavings and garden and yard trimmings into compost. At the same time Tibetan farmers tended to the gardens. A little farther east from the mudded straw-bale shed, extensive water collection system, and thatched entrance to the passive solar greenhouse erected by several Huichol Indian farmers is a maze of adobe rooms that house visitors and the administrative offices for the Sol y Sombra Foundation, and the Center for the Study of Community.

Water is the foundation of the gardens, and the gardens are the foundation of the biological and cultural diversity at Sol y Sombra. —Beth Miller

A talented group of artists and musicians had gathered in preparation for the Rainbow Warrior Music Festival. The Millers graciously housed them and threw an extravagant pre-festival party. Gilkyson showed up as the guest of honor. The enthusiastic crowd from around the country warmly welcomed her and asked for a song, but she hadn’t thought to bring a guitar. So, she borrowed mine and began to sing in her soulful and engaging voice.

Those of us not performing the following day sat in the enclosed courtyard in front of a kiva fireplace, drank wine, played our guitars, and sang late into the night. With my bare feet on the still-warm Saltillo tile and a guitar perched on my lap, a wave of cool air rolled in through the lumbering hallway, raising the hair on my arms and legs. Then we heard footsteps. O’Keeffe’s presence was palpable. Some of us stopped to listen. The empty rocking chair next to me began to rock. Above it, on the earthen wall, hung an original O’Keeffe landscape. I wasn’t the only one who felt her unnerving presence.

“Leave!” I heard the wind say, “You are disturbing my sleep.” We had carried on too loud and too late, disrupting the desert’s solitude and silence. O’Keeffe’s spirit shooed us away. Those who sensed her visitation caught each other’s eyes as we put instruments in their cases and silently retreated to our rooms. She rocked my world that night. Veils wear thin in the desert between spirit and the living.

Sol y Sombra hallway

After pouring myself a cup of coffee the following morning, I returned to the courtyard with a journal and pen and wrote about the ghostly encounter. Then I wrote the song Bones and Feathers.

CD Cover design by Thea/photography by Michael Stoklos

One day after the festival, Beth asked if I would perform a concert for the remaining guests and staff. The concert happened in The Lodge, a frequent meeting place for political leaders, philosophers, scientists, and citizen activists to come together and advance community initiatives. Beth and Charles have also hosted the Dalai Lama, Robert Redford, and John Denver. Beth formerly worked for John Denver’s Windstar Foundation in Colorado.

The Lodge is a magnificent performance hall with massively carved vertical and horizontal vigas. Navajo rugs lay atop a Saltillo tile floor beneath an elaborate hand-peeled, herringbone latilla and beam ceiling. Beth had made a second request. She wanted to know if I would change the strings on John Denver’s guitar, which he kept at The Lodge because he regularly visited and performed there. And so I did, feeling honored to have been asked. I’m a big fan of Denver’s and appreciated the opportunity to know that he would touch those strings and our voices would reverberate in the same grand hall.

The Lodge at Sol y Sombra

At the concert I gave in The Lodge for Beth, I met Sananda Ra, who would become a lifelong friend. Sananda wrote the song She Cried, which I arranged, recorded, and released on my Eagle’s Gift CD.

One afternoon, Beth invited me to sit with her and a few staff members on the well-manicured lawn of the elegantly restored adobe main house built in the 1930s. A family of ravens came to visit us as we sat in the shade beneath a giant Douglas fir, breathing in the sage-scented desert air and sipping iced herbal tea with lemon and mint.

The ravens that had alighted high up in the fir tree’s branches slowly began to glide down one by one to the lower branches. A few soared to the lawn and paraded before us. The ones above chatted, preened, and laughed at us as ravens are known to do. They displayed a fantastic array of coos, clicks, and head bobs. Beth and I laughed and chatted right along with them. These were Her ravens.

Then, as if on cue, Beth’s secretary brought a pile of mail for Beth to sort through. I watched as she opened a large envelope containing a coffee table book about ravens. In her delight, she shared that the book had been sent by a previous visitor to the Miller’s home who witnessed Beth’s interaction with the birds she loved. Excited to share her new keepsake with me, we sat side by side admiring page after page of beautifully illustrated ravens.

Beth told me funny stories about the raven family, who had been living there for generations before she acquired the property. She had watched the parents and the antics of their young from the time they were beginning to learn how to fly to when they became clumsy adolescents that turned into mature birds. They watched us as curiously as we watched them. Beth appreciated that I admired them as much as she because I did. Before I got up to leave, she presented me with a shiny blue-black raven feather plucked from the brim of her hat. When she saw my look of surprise, she laughed, “Oh, they gift them to me all the time!” But it was a grand prize for me.

Beth Miller wants to get everyone’s feet back on the land. “Who knows?” she remarks, “perhaps clean food grown locally and eaten seasonally could become de rigueur.”

Charles Miller, uniquely qualified to create educational programs for the Sol y Sombra Foundation and Center for the Study of Community, passed away in 2017. He firmly believed in the essential value of education. Charles worked tirelessly for decades to improve academic results for students and parents and advised Texas Governors on education reform. He used his hunger for change and the gift of a powerful intellect to shift the world toward the better.

Beth Miller passed away three years later in 2020, and her work lives on through the people she met, taught, and touched. I am one of these. I felt drawn to return to the Desert Southwest in 2023, partially because of the beauty and innovation I experienced at the Miller’s home in Santa Fe. Sol y Sombra was recognized as a Wildlife Habitat of Exceptional Merit by the National Wildlife Federation. In 2004, PBS produced a documentary about Beth’s water reclamation work entitled Clearwater: One Woman’s Prayer. Beth’s final days were spent not as O’Keeffe spent hers at Sol y Sombra but with her daughter in Tepoztlán, Mexico, where she shared her work on water conservation in a climate similar to the one in Santa Fe.

Time is either the great leveler, an illusion, or both. Spirit is real and knows no bounds of time and space. After so many years, I am grateful to share this story to honor what has come before and what may continue. While our study and understanding of the importance of community have evolved significantly since the 1980s and 90s, Beth and Charles Miller were its pioneers, and I admire their spirit. Sol y Sombra was a part of their legacy.

In 2000, the Millers sold Sol y Sombra for 12 million, currently listed for 15 million. Perhaps O’Keeffe is turning in her grave. At age 98, she had outlived her band of talented rogue contemporaries by decades. Her hauntingly simple images captured life and death on canvas in the form of an exotic flower or the pelvic bones of fallen cattle. At the time of her death, O’Keeffe’s paintings were owned by more than 50 museums and formed a major part of many private collections.

Of all the wisdom and beauty that O’Keeffe shared with the world, there is one quote that I cherish:

…in a way—nobody sees a flower—really—it is so small—we haven’t time—and to see takes time like to have a friend takes time. —O’Keeffe

Iris, photo by Thea

Thank you for taking the time to read my post and for being one of my subscribers. Your support means the world to me. UPGRADE NOW to PAID for only $5/month and receive a download code in your inbox for the entire Eagle’s Gift CD ($15 value), originally released as the self-titled Thea and sold out (not to be reprinted).

Paid Subscribers receive priority content below:

Sangre de Cristo, written by Tina Collins & Thea, sung accapella by Tina, Thea, & Jenny Bird. Produced by Thea for StarPony Productions. Previously released on Tina’s Journey Onward CD.