Ever since I attended New Mexico Girl’s State, and especially since I moved away from New Mexico 12 years ago, when I return and take in the landscape I start to sing the state song in my head. Which is a problem for many reasons, including a natural aversion to state or national songs of any kind as well as an inability to remember more than the first three lines of this particular one. And of course the chorus. Always, the chorus.
There I was last weekend, riding through the desert (my horse with no name an Avis rental car, apologies to Mr. Young) to arrive in the only landscape that has ever captivated me and made me certain there is a meaning and purpose to this existence that is magical, eternal, and unknowable to mere mortals. New Mexico is where I go to be home, not just in the sense that I know people there and have a personal history there, but where I go to be reminded of my place in the order of things — or the disorder of things, as the case may be.
There is nothing that can match the sense of being surrounded by the mountains and mesas, the sky that stretches forever and carries every expression in the weather it brings, the tenacious animals that make their homes amid the mesquite and sagebrush. I sat on a rock early one morning deep in the Jemez Mountains and stared down into the valley, felt the crisp sun on my face and arms and the pink glow that rose from the light landing on the orange earth dotted with bushes, and, further up, Ponderosa Pine. I was overcome with an urge to throw myself into the valley, to be enveloped by its beauty, washed clean by the daily thunderstorms, healed by the effusive hot springs, consumed by the very life of the place. I imagined being held by the earth, swallowed by her and held on her tongue for a time before being spit out (too bitter to be kept for long), renewed. I wanted the land to want me as much as I wanted it: passionately, irrationally, adoringly.
But truly the thing that has always been most calming about this landscape to me is its indifference. The magnitude of its existence, the sense of time before time and long after my time makes it a trustworthy place to leave the struggles and the celebrations of my own life. Death can be held here, and finds company with people who have mourned it in many cultures, through wars and droughts and blizzards and floods, with many gods and One True God. Life, too, is precious and always worthy of note. The people are gentle with each other, strangers, because everyone has a sense of being a stranger here. There is no mistaking that there is something much larger than yourself that determines the fate of your existence; the illusion of personal invincibility is not one that can last in this landscape.
I’m so grateful for my brief reunion with the god of open skies and hard rains, of eternal mountains and cool streams of living water. My heart is welling with thanks and praise to the people who have been my sustenance in that landscape, who I have carried in my heart just as I have saved the earth from Santuario de Chimayo on my prayer altar during these many years away.
O fair New Mexico, I love I love you so.
