I got stuck in Santa Fe once.
It's a funny place to get stuck, you would think that there's lots of cool stuff going on but the reality is I'd been living in the woods and my clothes were dirty and in my hippy frock over my cut-off baggies and the bandanna wrapped around my dirty hair the fancy ladies in the art shops that I thought I'd enjoy downtown ended up tailing me the whole time cuz I guess they thought I was a thief. Every place more or less turned out to be like that--catering to wealth, and it pissed me off and when we tried to leave we got stuck, literally. The town is a circular lay-out, not a grid, so every time we thought we were heading the right way towards the desert and on to the highway towards Tuscon and a buddy of mind we'd end up circled back where we began. Santa Fe is bordered on one side by all these fabulous adobe houses on flat brown cactus land as far as the eye can see, and on the other by the the Sangre de Cristos and a National Forest. We didn't know about Taos then, the community and spiritual devotees around there, all we knew was that we hated our first experience in Santa Fe and were tired and wanted to get out. So after that first day we headed up in to forest where we could set up camp and stay.
Thinking about it now, I easily remember coming down across the mountains of the southern border of Colorado and coming around a great wide corner out of the woods and seeing the low land laid out before us and singing like a song, it swept me whole and sudden and clean inside and took my breath away, it stopped Brandon mid-sentence. That's the energy the shamans talk about, some swift but beautiful collusion between mountain elements and the dry and drastic desert flat-land that was so stunning it was almost visual.
That first night in the Santa Fe Forest some kids came up the forest road massively tripped out on drugs, the next morning this hippy dreadlock girl whose name I cant now remember came over to our tent to say hello and to make sure we made it through the night undisturbed by the kids that were freaking out. She was sad with a sad spirit and on her own, we talked a long time that morning over coffee it turned out it was the anniversary of when she'd given her child up for adoption. She gave me a turquoise necklace and I gave her a tourmaline because it helps with forgiveness of the self.
We tried to leave again that afternoon and got stuck again. Literally, traffic and double backs that made us lose our minds. We regrouped, decided to find a community center where we could shower, then decided to surrender to the flow and set up in the woods for a few days, hoping the stuckness would pass. The sunset that night after our shower put orange and sherbert light all over the dark greens and browns of the adobe'd plain. It was the most outrageous display of sunsettingness that I have ever seen.
Turns out there was a free speaker at the Masonic Lodge that we were meant to hear over the weekend. We'd been, since around the time of full moon over Fourth of July when we camped deep in the Black Hills of South Dakota, sort of following these very serendipitous experiences based around growing knowledge of indigenous cultures living in unison with the land, and the deeper idea of the earth itself in its varied forms holding its own systems of magnetic energies called lay lines. Now I remember, the first place that info came (in addition to Gary Snyder's writings on animism, but we brought him along) was in Maine which was literally our third stop, in Southwest Harbor by Acadia. And then it just kept coming, from everywhere, in every direction. The speaker at the Lodge stood there and tied it all together. It was pretty amazing.
I dont have any money, none at all, to pay bills right now or much less to move to Baltimore and coming to terms with that has been real tough. But I realized something the past few days and that's that sometimes for reasons you dont even know, where you are is where you're meant to be. Even if at first it feels or looks maddening and kinda like your stuck. My book is writing itself. I have work on the horizon. I'm gonna hang out in the forest a while I guess and be grateful for what's going on right now exactly where I'm at.
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