Who We Are

By Gussie Fauntleroy. “I’ve planted a lot of seeds and now, I love seeing the sprouts of rebirth,” Whitney Strong mused, sitting in her small, comfortable, hogan-shaped home near the entrance to the Baca, one of the first houses built here in the 1970s. Whitney has been in Crestone-Baca almost as long, and the seeds she’s referring to are projects and organizations she either began or helped start, and led, many years ago. Among them: A couple of years after moving here in 1980, she created the community’s first artists’ collective, arranging for exhibitions by artists from around the Valley at...

An artist’s path to acceptance and hope By Gussie Fauntleroy Teresa Dunwell’s earliest awareness that it’s okay for something beautiful not to last was as a young child when her mother allowed her to paint murals on the walls of the family’s home. Mother and daughter were both in love with color and her mother would periodically repaint the walls in vivid hues: emerald green or tiger lily orange to contrast with royal blue furniture.  Each time before she did, little Teresa was free to first cover the walls with murals. She painted wildly colorful flowers, rainbows, birds — anything from nature...

A musician’s journey into wellness By Gussie Fauntleroy. Fairly early in his musical life, Nicholas Penn abandoned the mainstream musician’s attitude of “Look what I can do!” and shifted instead to: “Look what you can do.” He tried the conventional approach for a few years, writing songs and playing in bars and clubs, mostly in the Lexington, Kentucky area where he’d graduated from Georgetown College. But he was miserable in the competitive world of self-promotion, and even the fanciest clubs involved an enormous imbalance between effort required and what he got paid.  So, in 2016, he decided to stop playing those gigs....

By Gussie Fauntleroy Almost none of the creative interests that Jessica Forman is weaving together and offering to the world were evident early in her life: a passion for herbalism and other paths to wellness, intuitive communication with ancient ancestors, storytelling, poetry and other forms of writing, and teaching young children to be good humans — all these threads emerged over time. They arose in particular through travel and absorbing the ways of other cultures, through addressing her own health, and through motherhood. Now 39 and reflecting on the place where she grew up — the semi-affluent suburban environment of Irvine,...

By Gussie Fauntleroy. A young girl who grew up watching her father perform magic tricks on stage could become cynical, knowing how the seeming magic was achieved. Or she could become someone who sees all of life as filled with wonder, mystery, and real magic. Morgaine Faust is the second kind of person. “I’ve always believed in magic, I’ve always believed anything is possible, and nothing surprised me,” she said, sitting in the meditation loft of her mountain foothills home in the Baca. The serene, light-filled space represents an affirmation of her belief that through implausible twists of fate, the...

By Gussie Fauntleroy For seven years in the small community of Nevada City, California, Michael DiMartino ran what he called The Hub. It was a “community resilience center” that provided an event space, offices, a speakers series, and a video/audio broadcast studio where DiMartino produced and hosted the Golden Road Show on radio and television from 2012 to 2020. Each of The Hub’s offerings reinforced what he sees as a critical and necessary way forward for addressing the world’s increasingly complex and serious issues.  DiMartino calls the approach “full spectrum regenerative design.” Like the name of his former center in California,...

By Gussie Fauntleroy Burt Wadman was a very inquisitive 5-year-old when a friend who lived next door in rural Long Island, New York, decided he wanted a small playhouse. The boy’s older brother agreed to build it. The night after the floor platform was in place, Burt couldn’t sleep. As hard as he tried, he could not figure out what would make the walls stay up. He tried standing up a 2x4 board, but it kept falling over. But then he watched, fascinated, as the older boy framed the walls. Looking back from the vantage point of an 82-year-old architect, Burt...

By Gussie Fauntleroy. After Cynthia Nielsen did Watsu, or aquatic bodywork, on a client in a Valley View Hot Springs pool not long ago, the woman told her, “I feel like I went to mermaid school.” She added that massage in water made her feel like a baby, with no separation between herself and the liquid environment.  It was a fitting testimonial for a therapist for whom being in and around water has been central to her life for as long as she can remember. For the past 12 years this has included Cynthia’s role as therapy coordinator at Valley View,...