REfLecTioNs-- back one year in time...

I was going through my files and found this tucked away in my "Fiction" folders-- I now remember putting it there because my life at the time seemed so much like a work of fiction and I wanted to play with the irony-- fact as fiction [I had just finished creating a unit on Capote's IN COLD BLOOD that spring that was driven by the fuzzy line between the two genres so I think I was a little preoccupied...] Anyway, I thought it was interesting to see how I was feeling on the brink of my last move and my last great adventure-- my first real venture into teaching and thought perhaps some of you might be interested too. It's also a bit of a love letter to Santa Fe...


25 july 2008
friday
santa fe [via albuquerque & minneapolis] to a home now officially temporary

[can you go home again?]


The romance and coincidence and the falling togetherness is not just in pages of storybooks; it had to derive from a reality; I just never knew who’s that reality was until now. It’s all of ours; it’s only in an equal balance of our energy toward believing action and letting go that we can see it; and that it is clearer than clearest “could even begin to be.” The past days of my life have been a constellation too perfectly patterned to have been mere chance and it is only from a bit of suspended distance that I can begin to process their meaning and their beauty, and the significance of what my behavior in relation to the situation has taught me about the nature of that frustratingly terrifying and elusive R.O.L. that Amalia talks about. This is more real than the limits; the risks aren’t risks they are growth in the way I’ve dreamed about and talked about always but never seen, or felt. This is my time, I’ve decided, where’s there’s nothing to loose. I am prepared but not invulnerable; the earth has turned upside down and been shaken to its core into a whole new kaleidoscopic organization of adventure. And I’m scared but at the same time not; disbelieving but confident. This is a chance, to be compelled to expand and challenge and bloom and hurt and laugh and create; all dimensions of me; it is vibrant. I trust myself to know this is what I need right now; but find it storybookish that it’s here that I’m ending up (or being) right now; somewhere not even on my conscious radar, having crept into a flood of anxious despair/floundering/fear…But that’s its beauty: no expectations set up around it to be shattered, as Anam said. Just openness to whatever it will be. Openness to true experience, through and through.
I couldn’t write earlier this week. Perhaps it was too real, or too surreal. But while I will keep trying to process it, undoubtedly, my real object here I think should be to just live it out. No more questions; decisions that challenge are never wrong because they help you grow as long as you can have time to reflect upon and shift within those decisions. I am so excited for life’s very new chapter. It begins now…



New Mexico is a foreign country to someone who has grown bones and brains in the north east. Stretches of desolation that isn’t really when you look close greet you when you descend locust-like onto arid desert and widewidewide spaces—the breadth makes you catch your breath even before the altitude surprise. The colors are warm and dry, like the air; there is more water in the bodies that populate (sparsely) the spaces than in the spaces themselves; nothing seems to have the heart to grow in the thirsty throws besides the stubborn scrub. But this is not the whole story; not by any means; the contours of what seems one dimensional stun the skylines that panorama in a way I have only before imagined but not well. Mountains undulate, waves in a landscape where water is holy and marked by a green that is not taken for granted; they play parroting games with any clouds that decide to linger above in a sea of bluer than blue, challenging these drifters to match their fluid solidity, at sunset with fiery colors in the palette. Spectacular bruises set on phoenix-fire gloriously promise a beautiful new day to rise from ash. Santa Fe’s oasis is what I will run to though when the sky and these giants get too big with open questions that don’t hide in the abstractions and distractions of skyscrapers. Tucked inside the nest of cottonwood trees and creative spirit and cosmopolitan culture infused with perspective and integrity and peace, I think I can find simultaneous solace and inspiration and enough to grow in and on, roots and blossoming boughs. Communities carved out that are truly mine; living and making mistakes on my own.