Enchanted
Photo by Kelly
New Mexico was perfect. It made me want to write letters home. Everything is magic, and everyone is an artist. It’s a living Martian landscape, and a few miles outside of Santa Fe there are yawning canyons and 10 different kinds of mountains: those covered in pines, these jagged with rainbowed layers of rock, and some that soar only to stop abruptly, bored and flat, butting up against the sky. The daily concerns for locals seem to be for history, art, and food. Perhaps, in that order.
There isn’t enough time to do everything, but K. and I made a go of it. I lost count somewhere around the fifth day with how many art galleries and museums we’d visited. I think we appreciate the video medium most. At the Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, we watched several Sundance short films by Native Americans and Indigenous peoples that were all wonderful (Sikumi, Two Cars One Night, Shimásání, and Gesture Down). A moment that I could've slipped into a suitcase--during our visit to SITE Santa Fe, at Feast: Radical Hospitality in Contemporary Art, two girls giggled continuously while watching Jan Švankmajer's Lunch. "He's eating his underpants," one of them yelled, "This is hilaaaaarious!"
I usually never want to head home on trips, as if I never had a home to begin with. Willing to relocate, just set me up here. This time it was different. While we were gone longer than usual, and it was farther than K. and I had ever been together, New Mexico is enough. It's enough in a different sense. It fills you up, you know? All the star gazing and gaping at people that dress better than me, and tours through the oldest this and the oldest that. It's a city that has the right to swagger but remains quietly humble. I'll admit that I never enjoyed an O'Keeffe until seeing Santa Fe. I’ll admit that I understood why everywhere we went people were talking about spirituality. In the flea market, the locals selling their wares gave away a free conversation on karma with every purchase. I hate public displays of sentimentality, but for Santa Fe, I'll make an exception.
