A Place For Art

I just returned from a brief vacation with my family to the Texas Hill Country, where we enjoyed the beautiful landscape, ate some wonderful food, visited wineries and a distillery, and enjoyed live music in Austin, Fredericksburg, Luckenbach, and Gruene. Most interesting to me were the dance halls and saloons, where a crowd gathered each night to listen to live music, have a drink or two, and where couples held each other close while they took a spin around the dance floor. Gruene Hall, billed as the oldest dance hall in Texas, was built by German immigrants who settled along the Guadalupe River to farm cotton shortly after Texas won its independence from Mexico. The dance hall, a huge wooden cathedral holding a bar, a stage, bench-style seating, and outdoor gardens, was completed in 1878, to serve as a gathering place for the farming community, who worked brutally hard to carve a living out of the wilderness. Even then, in that place, the importance of music, and of providing a place to celebrate life and art, was recognized. It occurred to me that in a small way, that’s what I’m trying to do with this site—create a place within the world of medicine and illness and healing and science and aging and wellness and death and dying and all the rest where you can visit and find art and music and drama and the stuff that life is made of. I think this stuff is important for everyone to recognize and experience, particularly those who choose to care for others, and I hope you and the rest of the community will stop by frequently.

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