Easter Lent, 2012–Come aboard, folks. Welcome to a new spiritual project for the  Southwest and the Chihuahuan Desert’s upper Rio Grande region around El Paso and Las Cruces in particular. I’m Dan Bodine, a retired Texas justice of the peace and former journalist. I’m your publisher.

Desert Mountain Times, the idea, started long ago in the Dallas-Fort Worth area with Southwest Times, Inc. A friend and I bought a weekly newspaper and added three small ones to it, in a common dream. We wanted a strong regional publication, heavy on human interest features, opinions and reader participation.

But that dream fizzled out in a bad economy; the corporation folded. And my life as I knew it then more or less ended. I ended up hundreds of miles away–in the mountains of the Chihuahuan Desert!

Ended up with hardly nothing more than a paper in a border community in Far West Texas, and having to take on a second job as  a judge later to keep it alive. But God was smiling on me. Few people will be lucky enough to gather such experiences.

And in the process, a new family and new culture, this strange, exhilarating, new desert mountain environment, and new good friends, too,  all combined to keep the dream alive that the late Don R. McNiel and I started back in the Dallas-Fort area, all those many years ago .

Now that I’m retired, our family living upstream a ways from Presidio but still in the desert mountains (in El Paso), we’re going back after what was started in 1985–only in electronic publishing.

We’re small now, but we’ll grow. Watch us. What we’ve done, too,  is convert an earlier site I tinkered with last year to a simpler content management system–one even I as a novice can now operate.

A sister start-up site, Center on Social Minimalism, further expounds on a political philosophy seared into me by Sunbelt capitalism.  And adds a twist to a hope that we as a people can turn around this virulent, radical capitalism disease that’s destroying our planet, and distancing our relationships with each other. I hope you’ll enjoy it also as it progresses. You can link  it from the page menu bar above.

So pull yourself up a chair and get comfortable. We’re here both to entertain and inform, and in doing so hope to make our world a little bit better.

Thank you always for your visits and your participation.