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.