Enchanting Me, Time and Time Again

Northern New Mexico is a place that never quite lets you forget where you stand in relation to it. Open, vast, rugged. New Mexico feels like a homecoming in the loosest and most exact sense of the word. Clara—my great-grandmother—homesteaded here, a fact that sits in the body more than the mind.

The altitude and memory knock on my body both at once. I start to make lists, chronicling what I want to hold onto in 6 months. I work to measure the future against the present, and so much of my past.

Between the introspection there are green-chile burgers eaten ceremonially, heat, smoke, and meat. Walks through the open range, a space that resists metaphor by being exactly what it is. There is climbing done alone, the kind that sharpens attention until thought becomes secondary to breath and stone. There is an afternoon soaking in arsenic pools, natural minerals said to make my bones ache less. A day spent in a room full of crystal skulls, a conversation with myself that left me convinced. The night filled with stars that arrive in numbers that demand I reckon with scale.

Last week I was surrounded by the land of enchantment. Videos and pictures below. Film still developing.