WHO DO WE BECOME when we've lost the things that defined us? When Linda Durham shuttered
her internationally acclaimed art gallery after thirty-three years, she found herself navigating a sea of bewilderment.
Risk-taking had long been the tour de force of her life. But had she failed, or had she succeeded?
Change always comes at a price.
Through delicious and dark, scintillating and salacious true
tales of planned and accidental intersections with the exotic
and quixotic, Durham pits her real self against her ideal self in
a lifelong journey as serpentine as the Mobius strip her father
made for her more than seven decades ago.
On stage and off, Durham creates and is created by story. Raven spirit tattoos on
both shoulders, wanderlust in her eyes, she danced in ceremony with tribal Kachin
women, chanted Free Gaza from aboard the seized Audacity of Hope ship, was cured
by a Voodoo priest in a Haitian cemetery, slogged through the tempestuous lands'
end at Tierra del Fuego, and breathlessly summitted Kilimanjaro. Everywhere this
around-the-world traveler wandered, she chased the ghosts of her own ignorance
and arrogance, culled clarity from confusion, and dug herself out from the crushing
numbness of defeat.
Durham unabashedly pulls back the curtain on loves lost and found and on a life
lived richly and openly amid fair fields and foreign wars, in places sacred and profane.
Her incurable optimism gives inspiration and voice to the struggles of women worldwide, empowers those of us who feel derailed by a world out of control, and frees us to open the door to love.
About the Author: 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 contemporary art galleries in Santa Fe and New York. In 2012, the New Mexico Museum of Art acquired her extensive gallery archives. A prolific writer and public speaker, she has been a 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. She, her partner, two cats, a dog, four chickens, and a pond full of fish live in an old adobe house in rural New Mexico. Durham's two children are both professional chefs. Her granddaughter is a young scholar.