‘Cowboy Meditations’Explores Poet Dick Gibford’s Work 

In his new film, Cowboy Meditations, Santa Barbara’s Gary Milliken follows lifelong cowboy and poet Dick Gibford, 76, at his wilderness cow camps in the Sierra Madre overlooking the Cuyama Valley in Santa Barbara County’s remote and untrammeled northeast corner.

In the summer, Gibford lives in an off-grid cabin, where he alone cares for cattle that range from Montgomery Potrero to Santa Barbara Canyon, over an area larger than Santa Cruz Island. In the winter, he moves down to an isolated cow camp at a lower elevation in the Cuyama foothills, where he keeps his small trailer warm with a wood-fired stove.

Milliken’s film explores Gibford’s simple way of life: daily chores, braiding rawhide, writing poetry, and training horses. Surrounded by vast open space with a star canopy by night and deep blue sky by day, the cowboy avoids urban and internet distractions, which allows him to live close to the natural world with his horses, calico cat, and the bears, mountain lions, rattlesnakes, horned lizards and black-tailed jackrabbits with whom he shares this vast terrain.

Gibford’s poetry is known throughout the west, as he is a regular contributor at the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko, Nevada, the premiere event of its kind. A volume of his poetry, Trail Dust, with a foreword by Waddie Mitchell, was printed several years ago.

Gibford’s solitary, aesthetic lifestyle provides a rich opportunity for self-examination: “…the mind slows way down, the chatter of the mind stops…. It’s more receptive to anything coming in from nature or the wilderness…. It humbles a person. My definition of freedom is to still the mind.”

Gibford’s learned and shared lessons are distilled in one scene when his father taught him to ride a calf as a 6-year-old. “He taught me not to be afraid to fall…. That helps you through your whole life.” 

Cowboy Meditations was voted Best Feature Documentary by members of the Screen Actors Guild at the Wild West Film Festival. Elizabeth Fowler of the Western Heritage and Film Festival wrote, “I was spellbound…. The film was lovingly done — simple, nuanced. The director and cinematographer let the landscape and the subject do all the talking…. The sound and editing are exquisite, letting the viewer partake without explanation. The effect of the storytelling is immediate, personal, and universal.”

Cowboy Mediations has been shown at film festivals in Vacaville, California; Friday Harbor, Washington; Hico, Texas; and at the Ojai Film Festival. It premiered in Santa Barbara County earlier this year to an enthusiastic, sold-out crowd at the Cuyama Valley Recreation Hall in New Cuyama. 

The 55-minute film will be shown on Tuesday, April 21, in the Santa Ynez Valley Grange (2374 Alamo Pintado Ave., Los Olivos). Two showings will beat 4 and 6:30 p.m. A $5 donation is suggested. See santaynezvalleygrange.org.