Nora Holzinger

I had read about it in books before I had ever seen the Sangre de Cristo mountains. I had dreams about it before I knew where it was. It captured my imagination in a way I can’t describe. It seemed like a Wild West fairytale.  Nestled between the peaks of the Sangre De Cristo mountains snakes the Santa Cruz river. Along the banks of that river is a small Catholic church, el Santuario de Chimayó, that every year hosts thousands of pilgrims who are seeking the blessed earth, la tierra bendita , that can cure whatever ails them.  I knew I needed to visit it, to touch la tierra bendita . Not because I believe, but because I wanted to believe. There was some small voice in my heart that suggested that la tierra bendita of Chimayó might even cure me.  --- The lands which the Santuario de Chimayó now occupies are central to the creation myth of the Tewa-speaking Pueblo Indians. They called the area Tsimajopokwi . This area, like much of northern New Mexico, has volcanic mineral ...

It’s hotter than you ever thought possible. You should have prepared better for this hike but now you’re out here with an empty water bottle and burning skin. Your legs feel heavy and your head aches, your vision blurs, blood rushes in your ears, you feel nauseous.  You plop down in the sand under some scrub brush, wiggling to get your head deeper into the dappled shade it provides - any twig between you and the sun is a positive development.  You tell yourself you can’t stop here but the shade feels good. You close your eyes for what you tell yourself is just a minute…  You open them to a stock-still jackrabbit a few inches from your face.  Sunlight filters through the blood vessels in the jackrabbit’s large ears and staring at you are luminous orange eyes that have seen present, past, future, and the yet-to-be-imagined, all possibilities unfurling like the desert landscape at sunrise.  You stare back into those deranged eyes as the red walls of the slot canyon...

  I was pedaling and panting, the wind whooshing in my ears, deafening, muffling all other sounds. Then I saw the coyotes. I pulled hard on my brakes and skidded to a stop. Suddenly the Bosque was quiet except for the maraca rustle of cottonwood leaves and my heaving breath. The summer sky was dark, a portent of the afternoon monsoon rains that would soon pelt the dry earth.  Four of them, two adults and two adolescents, striding over the bridge spanning the acequia towards me. One of the adults yawned, head low in the heat while the other adult looked back at the teenaged coyotes trailing behind. They came up the bridge and spotted me on the rise not 50 feet away, yellow eyes looking me over as they continued on, unconcerned with my presence.  This was my second encounter with coyotes in as many weeks. As the month dragged on, I would see a coyote every time I traveled through the Bosque.  — “The Bosque” as the locals call it, is the Rio Grande Valley State Park. I ...

I won't bury the lede - building community is at odds with modern life. I don’t mean in the sense that many of us are working multiple jobs, with long commutes, for little pay, raising children without much support, without even the prospect of retirement to comfort us - all of that matters too. I mean in the sense that our beliefs about how we and others should be in and move through this world are not conducive to building community.  Community is how humans survived the past 300,000 years and how we have come to inhabit nearly every corner of the earth.  Yet it’s only taken 75 years for Americans to lose it.  Many of us know little about the people who live next door to us. We don’t attend church, belong to civic groups nor social organizations, nor do we volunteer.  As Marc Dunkleman notes in his book “The Vanishing Neighbor”, Americans today mainly keep in touch with their closest friends and family members, and have very little interaction or relationship with ...