Love, Actually

Tuesday, September 18 - Day II.95 (460) 

Today I arrived safely to my grandmother's place in Los Alamos. This place is holy to me. It is the only place I feel is something akin to "home." This is truly tierra sagrada, and I am so grateful for every moment here.

My grandmother's handmade stained glass windows

Wednesday, September 19 - Day II.97 (461)
Today I had to shell out a lot of money to make my car safe. But at least my car is safe.

Thursday, September 20 - Day II.98 (462)

Nothing quite like a New Mexico hike - we did the Red Dot Trail down from the mesa to the Rio Grande. And yes, we jumped into the pool when we finished.


Friday, September 21 - Day II.99 (463)Bandelier. I love this place, in all its seasons, in all its permutations.

Enter the kiva!

Climbing to Alcove House

View of Frijolito Canyon

Reward for a long hike

Saturday, September 22 - Day II.100 (464)
I believe in love.

Congratulations to Shane & Jesse!

Hacienda Dona Andrea by night

Congratulations to my dear friends on their wedding day. I am tremendously honored and excited to be here with them on this special day, and to celebrate love. May we all have the joy, privilege and right to marry our person.

Days 162 - 166: Thanksgiving in New Mexico

My apologies for the tardiness. I was traveling!

For Wednesday, Nov 23 - Day 162
Today I'm grateful for a job that's very flexible, and for safe travel to Flagstaff. I'm also grateful for solo road trips after dark, where you can have as many sing-alongs as you like, with no one to judge your crazy facial expressions, music selection, or volume.

For Thursday, Thanksgiving, Nov 24 - Day 163
I'm grateful for safe travel from Flagstaff, AZ, to White Rock, NM. The sunrise in Flagstaff was gorgeous, cresting the snow-topped peaks in a rosy pink. I love the road into New Mexico: you go through these canyons, come out in front of the Bandera volcano, then through some winding canyons before coming across a plain and then all of a sudden, the Sandias appear out of nowhere, heart-stopping and huge in front of you. Take a left at the Sandias, drive til you hit the Sangres, then make a left to cross the valley and go up the 502 through the canyon, across the Rio Grande, up to the Jemez, to the house my grandmother built. I will never tire on this road, nor will the smell of juniper & pinon ever become old to me.

I am also grateful to have received emails from professors that encourage. And I'm grateful to be single for the holidays. It's crazy, but there's something about it that clarifies. I am beginning to see what happiness looks like for me. "Hope is the thing with feathers," said Emily Dickinson. Yes.

For Friday, Nov 25 - Day 164

Today I went to Bandelier. I have made so many pilgrimages here, and it never gets old. I climbed the Frijolito Ruins trail to look down into the canyon below. Trite, but true: you can see so much more, you understand the context, when you can get above it, look down on it, see the bigger picture.

The last time I was here, in September, Bandelier was closed due to the terrible Las Conchas fire and flood damage. I could see little sign of the fires, but did see the sweeping clods of earth relocated by the flood. But the trails were mostly open, and visitors were here again. The ruins are safe, undisturbed.

It's a reminder, no matter how devastating the fire, life begins anew.

For Saturday, Nov 26 - Day 165
My grandmother has done extensive work building out our family tree. She showed me all the way back to the 1500s, and I couldn't help but wonder at seeing all the names: what were the lives of these people like? She can trace us back to two passengers on the Mayflower, John Locke, Pretty Boy Floyd, Emily Dickinson & ee cummings (how perfect, two of my favorite poets!), a convicted witch executed in the Salem Witch Trials, and First Lady Mary Harrison. Our lives are all so little, and so intermingled. Best to tread with kindness.

For Sunday, Nov 27 - Day 166
907 miles, 13.5 hours. So grateful for good roads, clear skies, and sleeping in my own bed!

Day 86: Zozobra; Day 87: Painted Desert

Zozobra before his demise, 9/8/2011

Tardy for 9/8/2011


Today I am grateful for the opportunity to burn my gloom. What I learned from the 87th annual burning of the Zozobra in Santa Fe was that gloom, fear, and misery will appear to be big, ugly, and indomitable from a distance. And they will protest fiercely when you decide to burn them, to eliminate them. They will make a huge fuss and it will seem like they will never go away. But we are more powerful than despair, misery and fear; in the end when we decide to get rid of them, we are ultimately more powerful and we can vanquish them.

There is something incredibly cathartic about writing your worries on a slip of paper, putting it in a box with the cares and stresses of 40,000 other people, and then watching a giant effigy with your worry-slips in it go up in flames. Whether it was Zozobra who took my worries or something else, I have banished Old Man Gloom in my heart and I am traveling lighter.

I'll add too that this year's Zozobra experienced a lengthy delay because the winds wouldn't die down enough for the fire department to allow the burning to take place (I guess a 50-foot burning man in a field with 40,000 people is probably a bit dangerous and a tiny liability...). My mom and I kept wondering if Zozobra would burn, or whether we'd be standing out in a chilly field in Santa Fe all night. It was taking forever! And we had changed our trip - stayed an extra night to see Zozobra, specifically - so it would have been a huge shame if we didn't get our gloom burned. And, like everything in this transition has been for me, it couldn't be rushed. I had to be patient, accept things in their own time, and steadfastly believe that things have a way of aligning when they are meant to be. Sure enough, at about 3 minutes past the point when we had said we'd leave, the ceremony began. I think in the end, it started right on time.

(I do have some great video, which I'll post here when I'm not in Kingman, AZ, where the wifi connection is not quite beefy enough to handle all the multimedia I want to share with you!)


For Friday, September 9, 2011
Wow I am grateful that tomorrow is the final day of the road trip. It's been long, and the cats and I are starting to show the strain of travel, exhaustion, and frustration. I am so excited to be in my new space, which is not my car.






I am also grateful for the opportunity to visit Petrified Forest National Park, which includes the Painted Desert and the Petrified Forest. It was a lovely detour, and I constantly am amazed by the desert's beauty. The colors in the painted desert were incredible, and it was great to see this gorgeous place: I found myself thinking of the desert painters I had seen at the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe and at Ghost Ranch in Abiquiu. As for the petrified wood, I had seen small pieces of petrified wood before, but never giant logs that still resembled trees. I'm so glad places like this exist, that they are protected, and that I am lucky enough to visit them. It's a great reminder of a few things: first, these trees that are now petrified wood are 225 million years old. 225 million! And in their lifespans, they have turned from wood into (precious) stone: proof that life works change in us that is completely unanticipated, and can turn the banal into the beautiful - if we but let it.