New Mexico is my spiritual home

The New Mexico sun symbol is everywhere, even in the architecture. Here it is in downtown La Cruces.

It’s easier to connect to spirit in New Mexico. Some people believe there’s a surplus of UFO sitings in the state because it’s sacred land and attractive to “outsiders,” almost like a portal.

I arrived there after a bizarre night in Marfa, Texas, staying at a $20 Airbnb called Cloud Dojo Temple that sat right in town, right next to the Mexican drug cartel. It was the front room of a very old adobe house owned by a dude about my age. Concrete-slab walls, cement floor, plywood boards patching together parts, big cracks in the old, earthen walls, a couple of foam pads on the floor, with a new, packaged bed bugs sheet protector sitting on one of them (great). The wooden door to the outside was so old, I had to push my whole body into it to close it far enough so that I could push over a small lock. It made me feel slightly safer, but there were no curtains on the windows either, and after being there a couple hours, I noticed there were holes everywhere in the seams of the walls. I was hoping it was just poor construction and not peepholes. Oddly enough, I slept OK, but I left early, as soon as I woke up the next day. I wasn’t up for trying to work the toilet outside, which had a broken seat and was constantly running. “If you want to get extra fancy,” the dude had told me the night before, reaching for a nearby hose, "you can do this to flush it.” He squeezed the hose lever and directed the stream into the back of the toilet. It still didn’t really look like it was flushing. I knew right then that I would opt for a coffee shop in the morning.

After that experience, followed by a drive through El Paso (not a fan), I was relieved—really, elated—to pass the “Welcome to New Mexico” sign on I-10. I was heading toward a friend’s house in Las Cruces to camp in his backyard for the night, then heading north into New Mexico to stay with people in Albuquerque and Angel Fire, making a week of it.

I didn’t see any UFOs while I was in the “Land of Enchantment,” but I had a lot of jaw-dropping moments, completely spellbound by the views out my car window and when I arrived at campgrounds.

Visiting White Sands was like being on another planet. It was so quiet, so stark white. I hiked a little and sat with the desert plants for too many hours, turns out; the dry heat and changes in elevation eventually took everything out of me, leaving me lightheaded and dizzy and dehydrated. But I didn’t care. I felt so connected to that land and its plants and animals and rolling white dunes.

New Mexico feels like my spiritual home, and every time I’m there, I get the distinct feeling that I should never leave.

I’d go up higher in elevation after that, driving up route 54 and then west on 380, a gorgeous road that I could’ve driven on for another three hours just to take in the views. Gusts of winds swept through as I drove through a mountain pass, light raindrops falling on my windshield and the temperature dropping from 95 to 65 in a matter of minutes. And in every 30 degrees of sky, a different sky altogether: a distant storm, lightning, sun, cumulous clouds, gray clouds, clear. I passed the small town of Carrizozo, which I thought was a ghost town until I noticed a small neighborhood and kids on bikes and a gas station that I passed going out of town, where a few people were filling up their trucks. Then I drove through the Valley of Fires, a dramatic, black-charred basin of molten rock and dust, yucca some 10 feet high blowing in their singular splendor in the winds. The site is one of the youngest lava flows in the U.S., forming after a volcanic eruption 5,000 years ago.

There were so many places to camp, so many roads I wanted to explore, but by the time I reached Albuquerque, what I really needed was to shower, shave, and moisturize. Lie in bed for 12 hours. Write for another 12. And that’s pretty much what I did when I arrived at the home of Maryann Pranulis, an artist in her 70s who I’d met back in Maryland.

Her stucco townhome was set right against the Sandia Mountains, and she was just the sweetest, welcoming me inside with open arms, good conversation, and home-cooked meals. She was very good at mothering me, and it made me feel a sense of place and belonging because of it. She also gave me the wonderful gift of my own room and bathroom, where I could shower, shave, and moisturize.

Her greyhound, Tally, who I thought would be intimidating to a recovering dog-phobe, was the most docile dog I’ve ever met, kind of like a cross between a cat and a small human. He’d thoughtfully and stubbornly arrange two small (normal-sized) dog beds on the kitchen floor in the same manner a human would arrange pillows in a bed, just to their liking. Then he’d hop onto the white leather couch and spread out his long, thin legs, occasionally rolling onto his back into “dead cockroach position,” as Maryann called it.

Maryann was my age when she left Connecticut, where she’d lived all her life, to take a job in Arizona. Then jobs took her to other places—Northern California, Southern California, Salt Lake City, and finally Frederick, Maryland, where she lived for 12 years. This is where we met briefly, in passing. Of the thousands of artists I interviewed there as the arts editor at The Frederick News-Post, she was one who slipped through the cracks. But we made up for it.

For whatever reason, it was the third night in a row that the conversation—with strangers or near-strangers—went immediately to religion and spirituality, which you’re apparently “not supposed to talk about” with people you barely know. She talked about her Christian church in Albuquerque, which runs along the lines of the thinking of Merton, that God is love and that he is in everyone and everything. Christian mysticism, really.

“After I retired, I was trying to find a place to settle, and I was really looking at the whole wold,” she told me. “I got it narrowed down to New Mexico and North Carolina.”

New Mexico, as it does, kept tugging at her heart strings.

“And you gotta follow your heart,” she said. “You know what they say: If you want to make God laugh, tell him about your plans.”

“Isn’t that the truth. This entire period of my life has been a test of faith, because I have no idea what I’m gonna do next or how I’m gonna do it. But I just keep being shown the way, and it’s working. It keeps unfolding. There are people who think what I’m doing is childish or an escape from reality, but I know this is what I am meant to be doing. I prayed every day to be shown what I was supposed to do, and then, well, I was shown.”

“I did the same thing,” she said.

Over the course of 24 hours, we covered a lot of ground. We talked about spirituality and vision quests and the idea of the Universal Christ and animal medicine, about being single women, the relationships we’ve been in, our health, our creative work—the list went on and on.

We drove into Old Town Albuquerque on the second night, listening to the local radio playing Spanish music all on the way. We strolled around the village, stopping for dinner at Cafe de Ruiz Church Street Cafe, a huge adobe built circa 1706 with walls that were four feet thick and dining areas that led from one room to the next. The ambience was spectacular. It was one of those moments where I felt like I actually was on vacation. We ate in an outdoor area in its center, with a fountain nearby. It’s the oldest residence in Albuquerque and one of the oldest structures in the state. I kept seeing my lucky number everywhere.

314, 314, 314, 314.

“There are no coincidences,” she kept saying, which, coincidentally, is a phrase my mom always says (my stepfather tends to roll his eyes and say, “They’re all coincidences,” which makes me laugh, even if I disagree). It’s a phrase borrowed from The Celestine Prophecy. “You know, it says in that book that people are put on your path for a reason," Maryann said, "and if you understand the reason and embrace it, you’ll meet more people who you’re meant to meet, and life keeps unfolding that way, bringing to you what you need to keep moving forward.”

“Exactly. It’s so true,” I said. “I really think I’m supposed to move to New Mexico.”

I saw 314 pop up everywhere on the drive back to her place that night: billboards, license plates, road signs, receipts. It felt like the heavens were sending me little message to cheer me on: You’re on the path! You’ve arrived!

“You know, somehow your email address got changed from gmail.com to gmail.love,” she told me the next day, after she’d tried to forward Father Rohr’s meditation passages to me about the Universal Christ. “You’re surrounded by love, whether you want it or not,” she said with a laugh, and we gave each other a big hug in her doorway before I headed out, promising to keep in touch.

Austin: city and country

Austin, Texas, city and country.

Every time I spend more than a night somewhere, I grow a little attached and don’t want to leave. Part of that is the wonderful reunions I’ve had with friends I haven’t seen in years—20 years, in some cases.

Leslie Crow and I were best friends in middle school. We’d go thrift shopping in Shepherdstown, West Virginia, listen to the Grateful Dead, make art, and talk about boys. Not a lot has changed, despite having more or less lost touch for two decades, after we both split town after high school.

Leslie still has that wild-west hippie kind of spirit about her. A free spirit, if I’ve ever met one. Always has been. The walls of her little A-frame cabin outside of Austin are covered with her paintings, dried flowers hanging from string, woven blankets, and tapestries. Every inch of floor and wall and table space is occupied by interesting things.

I think she’s the most creative person I know. And she’s never compromised to take a “day job”; she’s found a way to make a living—and a life—on her own terms since she finished high school and left Maryland. She went to LA first and was a model there for 12 years. Then she moved to a farm in Austin eight years ago (and lived in Tucson, at one point). Now she makes hand-sewn leather bags and clothing and sells her custom work (pieces of art, really) primarily online, although she recently canceled her wifi and in retrospect realized that running an online business without wifi is kind of difficult. But with that same stubborn determination that got her out of Maryland and working for herself, she’s pushing forward without wifi.

“I didn’t realize until it was gone how much time I’d just be scrolling through Instagram or looking things up,” she said, her eyes widening. “It was just lost time.”

It was all very inspiring. Mostly the part about being completely self-sustainable for 20 years and blazing her own trail.

We walked around the farm to feed the goats and pigs and horses and a donkey. The farm was founded in the 1960s, not as a commune, per se, but more as a collective—little houses forming a small community. It was nicknamed the Funny Farm because a comedy troupe lived there in those days. Luckily for Leslie (and me), the communal swimming pool sits right behind her house, so she has it to herself most of the time.

That first night at her house, I started in on a bottle of some fancy botanical gin I’d bought a few states back. It smelled like perfume and went down real smooth. We sat on her front porch for hours, smoking rolled tobacco, drinking, and in a round-about way, catching up on the past 20 years. We talked about our creative work and the book we should write together (we’ve always had lists of ideas to work on together).

“I have young girls coming up to me at shows, telling me how I’ve inspired them,” she told me. “That’s all I want to do—show this next generation that it’s possible—and it’s cool—to live on a farm and raise animals and make art, and that you can do it.”

Cicadas buzzed and bounced around the porch as I contemplated my life and hers. She warned me about a neighborhood skunk that she’d befriended. I looked up her natal chart. We talked about everyone we know from back home, including people who had died. We talked about spirituality and visions and road trips and people we’ve met along the way. We talked about health and what the secret is for aging gracefully.

“I got every wrinkle I have during the two years I was living in Arizona,” she told me.

“Really?”

“Yep.”

“I kind of like that weathered, desert look.”

I passed out fast that night and didn’t seem to mind there being no AC. She created a little bed for me—pillows on the floor with an Our Lady of Guadalupe blanket on top. It was a room that she’d originally intended to be her work studio, although her work was strewn about the house—on her wooden table, on the floor.

The next day, we hiked around the farm, worked up a sweat (not difficult in Texas in July), and then slipped into the little pool, cooling off in and taking in the little paradise that it was—surrounded by fields of flowers and trees, and butterflies and grasshoppers that would occasionally fall into the pool. Leslie saved them all. She liked to put on puppet shows with the grasshoppers before releasing them, but she was like the patron saint of the insects that had fallen into the pool.

Going to visit Angie, who I hadn’t seen in several—eight?—years, I immediately felt the dichotomy between the two friends and wondered if they represented different aspects of myself—or my past—or if I was just thinking too much. Angie is more disciplined. She’s funny and fun and deep. She’s one of those people who seem to never lose their composure. She lives in the city and works as a massage therapist and goes swimming several times a week and is also an amazing aerial dancer, takes belly dancing classes, and knows all the cool new spots in the city—like the bar where you have to walk into a separate interior door that opens up into another bar, speakeasy style, and the Thai restaurant in her SoCo neighborhood—“the Manhattan of Austin,” as she called it—that sells 12 exotic flavors of coconut milk ice cream, like spirulina mint chocolate chip and lavender caramel (those were the first two that I tried, and I fell in love with both).

I laid out my sleeping bag on her couch after we’d walked along the Colorado River to see the city skyline at night. Austin is like one of those utopian cities. It would be really easy to live there. It has everything you’d want, unless you want blue-collar grit and that stimulating sort of electricity that is synonymous with big East Coast cities.

“This house is getting bulldozed this year and replaced with condos,” she told me, as we were getting ready for bed. “It’s happening all over the city. Everywhere. All these historic neighborhoods are disappearing.”

We talked about spirituality and the past and love interests and Austin and Hagerstown and mutual friends and work and the cost of living and what we’ve been doing with our lives until we seemingly ran out of things worth catching up on and could hang out in the present moment.

When the sun was high in the sky again, she took me to Barton Springs, a magical place in town where a gigantic swimming pool is fed by a natural spring and stays at 68 degrees year-round. We swam across its intimidating width (you can’t stand anywhere), swam back, laid on a blanket to dry in the sun, then jumped back in a few more times before leaving.

After five days in Austin with Leslie and Angie, it felt like I had to rip off a little piece of my heart to slip away and get back into the mentality of movement, the nomadic life. I was so grateful for all of it—just sitting in the same room with two people who, at one time in my life, were my go-to people. It’s as if once you reach a certain level of intimacy with another human being, that connection can never be erased, even if people change (do people ever really change?).

All the while, I was thinking about Mercury, which was going retrograde, along with several other planets that are retrograde this summer. What a perfect time to revisit old friends and reconnect with past versions of yourself. These retrogrades bring reunion. They bring back into your life the people, places, and things that need revisited—where the work isn’t done, where there is some sort of unfinished business or unrest, where the story isn’t over.

In a broader sense, all of this—this whole life on the road—is a long-ago idea revisited. It’s the way I’ve always wanted to live, the dream I’d always come back to.

Interlude: This is an experiment

I've set up my desk in a lot of places ... picnic tables, beds, kitchen counters, gardens, my foldout table in the woods, motels, coffee shops. It centers me, grounds me, to have that space, wherever I can find it.

Sometimes, when I’m driving a new highway across a new landscape, I think, “Shouldn’t I be more excited about this?” Is it the lack of caffeine? I’m just not that thrilled.

At other times, it hits me—you’re doing it, you’re doing what you’ve wanted to do for 20 years—and tears of joy fill my eyes. There are distinct moments when this happens, and they cut like a razor into my memory. These memories are sharp, crisp: The pelican soaring over me on the miles-long bridge across Oregon Inlet, as I belted out “Man in the Mirror” and felt as free and liberated as that bird. The opening of New Mexico, God’s country, where the subdued palette and brown, pointy mountains held my mouth agape as I drove across Route 380, through the Valley of Fires.

But more often, I’ll have these moments on the road where I think, “Didn’t I feel a lot more excited the last time I drove across the country?” Granted, I was seeing everything for the first time. Over a decade ago, I was on a three-week vacation, and also fueled by strong coffee every morning, which I’ve since traded for tea. These travels feel distinctly different, maybe because they’re not a vacation. It’s not a three-week road trip after which I return to my 9-5 job. I’m living on the road. It’s the feeling of days unfolding without any real structure. I’m just out here. Wandering.

I keep coming back to the same question: What am I going to do “afterwards”? Will there BE an afterwards? This is not a college gap year. This is not time away after the kids have left home. This is not retirement. Will this life simply go on, or will I return to a 9-5 and join the masses again, settle, rent a place somewhere, go “back.”

This question is in the back of my mind at all times. Not necessarily burning a hole in it but certainly penetrating through my every day. I wanted to see if freelancing was sustainable because everyone said it’s not—multiple people who’d tried it for a few months up to a few years before giving up. Extremely talented writers and editors. They all gave up. I’ve already learned that you have to do twice the work for half the pay. Journalists already don’t make a lot of money and do a ton of work, so this is pretty depressing and not exactly appealing, and yet every day, I am grateful to have the freedom and flexibility of being a freelancer, and I’ve been determined to make it work. After being laid off, I spent eight months in Baltimore “making it work” until my lease was up in May. That showed me that freelancing is possible. The road less traveled, but possible if you really wanted it.

The next question: is freelancing while living on the road sustainable? I am obviously still figuring out this next level of the experiment. So far, it’s working, but it’s a logistical nightmare. Even Kerouac had a home base with his aunt, somewhere to retreat to and do his writing before leaving again to hit the road. After a week or so of traveling and staying with friends and friends of friends, I get the overwhelming feeling that I need to hole myself up in a room in front of my laptop and write for 12 hours straight. Then repeat. The writer in me is ready to burst. I totally understand how Kerouac poured out “On the Road” in a matter of weeks.

On my second-to-last onsite writing assignment in Baltimore, I took an Uber across the city to get back to my parked car, and it seemed fateful. The driver wasn’t particularly chatty, but after a few minutes, I found myself asking questions (all these years of interviewing people is hard to shake). He said he’d been driving all night and into the morning, was a registered Uber driver in multiple states in the region, and made a life of it. He brought in enough money each month to live in hotels. To live, in a word, nomadically. I was intrigued. For every other Uber driver I’d ridden with, the gig was a side hustle, just to bring in some extra cash, to supplement. This guy went through a nasty divorce a year ago and said fuck it. And LIVED “fuck it.” Sold everything he owned. Began his life on the road, quite literally. “I’ve never been happier,” he said, as he dropped me off. We wished each other luck in our nomadic lives. I guess it’s just in some of us.

I keep wondering if this whole experiment is just a youthful notion, a pipe dream realized for a short time before it gives way to the standard American life. Doesn’t every teenager dream of traveling the country? Do they just grow out of it, replacing those thoughts with dreams of getting married, buying a home, and having kids? Do I still carry that deep desire because I don’t want kids? Is this something I have to get out of my system, or is this who I am? A nomad. A writer. Someone who simply won’t ever feel fulfilled living the status quo life. I want to find out if another way of life is possible. That’s why I’m here. Yes, there is certainly a spiritual element, and reconnecting with old friends is a bonus, but at its roots is that burning desire and question, to find out firsthand whether a nomadic existence is sustainable or whether it remains a pipe dream for most people for good reason. Figuring it out is worth the risk. So here I am. Figuring it out.