I’m sitting on the back patio in the last warm sliver of sunlight. As the sun quickly lowers behind the tree tops the cool shadows of desert air envelop me.
It will be too cold to sit outside, even in the sun, when we get home.
End of the day, end of the vacation, I’m sad.
I’m not sad to be going home. I can’t wait to get back to my studio, to see the animals, get back into the familiar rhythm of our creative lives together.
I’m sad to be leaving.
New Mexico could easily be my home. I don’t understand why but I feel connected to the place. I feel it in my feet when they touch the ground. The same way I felt when I lived here for a short time 15 years ago.
I always wanted to come back. Something here pulls at me. Something in the earth, the landscape, the air, the light, the weather. A visual simplicity of things being what they are. The bare earth.
I got my period this morning and thought how appropriate. I wasn’t expecting it, but felt it was just another connection to the earth. Tying me to this place as if my body knows what my mind keeps trying to make sense of.
I’m happy to be going home, it’s the leaving that makes me sad.
This is how I feel whenever I leave the seaside, a deep sadness because I leave my connection to the ocean and to the earth. I have always had a connection to the earth but nothing as strong as when I am at the seashore the tides call to me, pulling at my heart strings, I always feel at home when I am at the waters edge. It is the one place I head to whenever I feel lost. I have hiked mountains and forest where my connection to nature is always strong but put me on a beach and my soul sings with joy.
Maria, when there is a body and mind connection to the earth wherever you are, you just know it’s right. There is more to the body/mind connection than we know but can sense. This morning a phone call came in early from the daughter of a close friend of mine. We’ve been friends since the age of seventeen and have ended up the past thirty years of our lives living close to one another in the countryside north of Toronto. The call was to tell me that my friend died last night. She had Pick’s Disease. During the time I was speaking to her daughter, a herd of deer came onto our back lawn, there must about been eight or ten of them. They were playing, chasing one another, standing looking up towards the house, cavorting and I thought of how timely this visual image was when it happened just as I learned my friend had passed on. It was almost as though she was visiting me now telling me she was free, her spirit entering the deer, free of her dementia, her body and her pain. And then they left. There is energy that we don’t recognize but in you, the recognition between your connection to New Mexico is there, your body knows its familiarity. It becomes part of your soul and mind. You may live there again one day.
Sandy P, in S.Ontario, Can.
I’m sorry to hear about your friends death Sandy. Your witnessing of the deer and the freedom of her spirit is beautiful and meaningful. Thanks for sharing it.
Maria, I know what you mean. You were fortunate to have lived there even a short time. I have only visited a couple of times and need to go back. There is something that touches the soul out there, connects you with the earth and sky and stars and, well just everything. It calls to me, even though I know I belong in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, part of me belongs there, too. It is funny how you can be happy to return home yet sad to leave NM….I guess because you are home in both places? I don’t know…..but I want to go back…. Thank you for sharing your trip with us…
Maria, I haven’t been back to New Mexico since my first visit in 2006…but I long to return.
I found and kept a few special rocks I found when I was there. There is one, especially, from the Ghost Ranch, that almost immediately upon touching pulls me back to the earth there I walked barefoot. It awakens every sensory connection. It feels alive. I often hold it when I meditate.
Sandy, my utmost blessings to you. One of my very best and most enduring, longtime friendships is with a brilliant woman who is facing her last weeks with Picks. I pray deeply for her release…and hope that I will have the blessing of a message similar to what you received when she leaves. It is a disease of despicable cruelty.
I have a few rocks from the area myself Virginia, I put them on my altar in my studio.