"Wherever you look in Luvina, it's a very sad place. You're going there, so you'll find out. I would say it's the place where sadness nests... the breeze that blows there moves it around but never takes it away." Such is the bleak world described in Juan Rulfo's short story, Luvina. When pianist Ana Cervantes asked me to compose a piece in response to the late Mexican author's writing, I had not read any of his work and looked forward to the books that would soon appear in my mailbox. Sitting in my studio, immersed in the grim desert of dire poverty and hopelessness Rulfo describes in this and other equally moving writings, I cried. Long since finishing the music, my thoughts still return to a landscape that is unspeakably sad and, through Rulfo's words, a place where slow and insistent burdens are met with simple, unquestioning acceptance.