Happy Thanksgiving! On a day when we give gifts, I wanted to offer you some poetic truth from one of MEA’s most popular in-house workshop facilitators, DL. Here’s a 7-second video of me, DL, and his wife Djuna in our new Spacruzzi hot tub boat on our Ranch pond earlier this week early in the morning when it was very cold. You’ve got to see this in person!
zines /zēn/
Plural form of zine
noun
A self-published, underground publication
Zines orbit around coffee shops and are often produced with a xerox machine and a stapler; cut and paste style. Content is a confluence of comics, essays, poems, drawings, art and a point of view. They skew punk/queer, and epitomize the DIY ethos. I have been involved in writing for; and publishing zines for the past 30 years.
Midlife in the City was written for Birdy magazine’s September 2025, issue #141. Birdy is a Denver based, glossy magazine with distribution across the US; less cut and paste, more Juxtapose meets Heavy Metal. You can hold Birdy in your hands, turn the pages and write to the editors. Their motto is PRINT IS UNDEAD. You can get a subscription delivered to your door BIRDYMAGAZINE.COM/SHOP Do it. It’s important to support art before it’s illegal.
Occasionally the editors of Birdy will send me a selection of visual prompts created by their stable of great artists to see if I’d be inspired to write an accompanying piece. Nick Flook’s (https://www.flookart.com/) brooding, rainy cityscape spoke to a part of me that I carry even under the buttery, autumn sunlight, of northern New Mexico. His work inspired the following story.
Midlife in the City…
Daniel Landes
When the storm rolled in I was unprepared for its severity. Consumed as I am with the immediacy of my world, I missed the warnings. Had I visited a rooftop I would have seen the clouds forming way out on the Eastern Plains. Rolling grey clouds, illuminated by intermittent flashes of lightning, dragging the earth with wispy tendrils of rain. From the rooftop I would have seen where the city ends and the vastness of the eastern plains flattens out. Looking west to see the immediate presence of Mount Blue Sky bumping base with the foothills outside of Denver. Mount Blue Sky was previously named after former Colorado governor John Evans who proved himself to be a murderous bastard when his declarations to “kill and destroy” hostile Indians lead to much death; including women, children and the elderly at the Sand Creek Massacre. Mountains, unlike monuments to Confederate soldiers, can’t be torn down, but you sure as fuck can rename them.
Had I not stopped paying attention to the news (my mental real estate is not available for just any developer to bulldoze) I could have heard the weather forecast predicting the intensity of the storm that was coming. Instead I’m down here on street level getting soaked to the bone looking at old photos on my phone wondering why me? My depth of field has shrunk to the end of my arm. I cannot see beyond my fingers. My world is small and immediate. Unimportant yet urgent. I carry the anxiety of someone who has actual responsibility to something greater than the economy. The rainwater is rising in the gutters and I feel no agency to move.
My parents have both died within the last few years. I miss my mother. She gave me comfort since before I could crawl. My father is buried alongside all the conversations we were both too afraid to have. I miss my father too. Not because he gave me comfort. Quite the opposite. I miss him for what was not said, like the opportunity to find out about his intentions and motivations. I am left with my assumptions. Over the years I have assumed his positive intent. It’s easier that way. I feel lost without them.
My sons, who I kissed a million times when their wrists were fat and their fingers chubby, have moved out of the house. Cleaning out the closet, I found a box filled with their childhood arts. I will never live to experience a joy as great as those times. Halcyon days indeed. They do not have a childhood home to return to so they come and sleep on the couch and feel awkward about raiding the fridge.
When I was young I climbed the highest peaks in the Rocky Mountains. From the summit I could see for miles, the mountain ranges beyond mountain ranges all beneath a half dome sky. I haven’t climbed a mountain in many years. My world is now so small and immediate.
What I know is; this storm will pass. Storms always pass. The sun will come out, my clothes will dry. But will I remember? Remember to climb? To expand my horizons and see beyond my immediate situation to see what is coming? Or will I stay down here on street level, content with my distractions, and act caught off guard when another storm rolls in?
-Daniel
Daniel ‘DL’ Landes is an author, entrepreneur, MEA facilitator and frequency healing practitioner with experience in guiding individuals and groups towards deeper connections with themselves, others, and the natural world.