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Chasing Autumn: How Nostalgia and Climate Change Led Me on a Trip up the Mountain

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I begged my partner to ferry me on the back of a motorcycle up the rutted, unpaved eastern side of the Sandia Mountains. I was searching for something. It was mid-October and still hot in Albuquerque, especially in the valley. The AC was on and we wore shorts while our local stores stocked plastic pumpkins and Halloween decorations. An unusual spate of rain gave the parched weeds false hope, and they rioted green in our yard. Autumn was not arriving, despite all the faithfully conducted rituals. The chile had been roasted, ristras strung, the hay baled and put up in barns, the crows returned, Balloon Fiesta chaos packed in, and tarantulas scuttled across the road searching for mates.  Every morning the sun rose a little later over the top of the Sandias, and every evening the sun painted them adobe a little earlier. Slowly the sun traced its way south along the eastern ridge of the Sandia mountains.  Every marker of the changing season had arrived except the one I lusted after...
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The Artist’s Way is Elitist Trash (And it totally works)

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  The morning sun peeks over two mountain ranges in New Mexico - the Sangre de Cristos of Santa Fe and the Sandias of Albuquerque, both moodily draped in clouds.  Two writers begin their morning pages - a stream-of-consciousness brain dump to kickstart creativity. One of these writers is me, hunched on my tattered blue cloth couch, scribbling as quickly as I can before I have to get ready for my desk job. The other is Julia Cameron on her leather upholstered chaise, in her million-dollar Santa Fe home. Nestled next to me is a cat I found in a dumpster. At Julia’s feet, a purebred westie .  We are both completing one of the pillars of her New Age self-help creativity bible, The Artist’s Way. The book draws a direct link between creativity and spirituality as the means of “unblocking” creatives who feel stuck or unproductive. It promises to be effective for “any one interested in creative living”, whether your art is a career or a hobby. Elizabeth Gilbert, Alicia Keys, and ...
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American Nomads and the Longing for a Non-existent Homeland

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  Everywhere I turn I am confronted by my own rootlessness. I lack a connectedness to any place. There is no place I can say that I am from. No “homeland”, that is important to my antecedents. No single constant through the changing seas of time and generations come and gone.  I currently live in New Mexico - a place that in some senses hasn’t changed much in the last 100 years. Outside the cities, the economy and way of life is still agrarian, with some people working the same piece of land since the 1500s. Folks here identify strongly with the land and don’t typically leave if they can help it.  As an obviously Anglo person, the (correct) assumption is that I’m not from New Mexico. Nuevomexicanos often guess where I am from (always California or Texas) and each time, I have to make a choice about where I want to say I am from, because the answer is really “no where”.  I come from a specific kind of nomadic Americans - the ones that travel city to city, state to sta...
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An Unexpected Lesson from the New Mexican Church with Magic Healing Dirt.

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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 ...
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Watering The Desert: Can an ancient water management system save the Southwest?

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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...
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