A Psalm for the Solstice
Cerrillos Hills State Park, the day before the Winter Solstice.
Hello, friends and readers. It has been over a month since my last Dispatch (confession?) and so if you’re new here, welcome. This is the little space I’ve carved out to share updates from the book tour for Through the Long Desert: Georgia O’Keeffe and Frank Lloyd Wright and to keep you out there in internet-land apprised of new events and novel existential crises.
Today, I’m sitting on the porch of Black Bird Saloon in Los Cerrillos, a town east of the Sandia Mountains. Down a flat stretch of Highway 14, past the penitentiary, a movie studio, and a charter school, the ore-rich hills of Los Cerrillos are just far enough from Santa Fe to feel truly “out of town.” An Amtrak train thunders by on its way to the station in Lamy. The woman at the table next to us is done up in Pendleton and sterling silver but you can tell she’s a local because there’s a little wear, a subtle patina to her ensemble that rich Texans cosplaying as New Mexicans never quite get right. She’s telling her companions about the gilded age of Los Cerrillos, back when this was a prosperous mining town. The propane heater is on but we barely need it; only when the breeze comes up does the low 50s weather bring a chill in the shade.
After a temperate and rainy summer here in Santa Fe, we’ve moved into a temperate and dry winter. I still find myself stripped down to bare arms on runs, slathering on sunscreen like it’s mid-July. There is no tang of frost to cut the sultry sharpness of woodsmoke in the air. I crave the clarifying purgatory of a few truly cold days, maybe a little snow. But even sitting outside in my shirtsleeves, there’s something about these truncated days. The low-slung solstice sun stays cradled in the embrace of the southern mountains well past sunrise. There is a stillness and focus that comes at this time of year. With the narrowing of the day goes a narrowing of perception, a winnowing down to the essentials.
Hiking this morning in Cerrillos Hills State Park, my friend and I read about how the native one-seed juniper trees are uniquely drought resistant, able to put down tap roots to an astonishing depth of 197 feet. I’m beguiled by the pernicious specificity of this number. Maybe it’s the image of the sign’s unnamed writer marooned in some stultifying government office making the conscious decision not to round to 200. Or maybe it’s that I’ve spent the last few months feeling a little unmoored and that image of sending down a tap root through inhospitable soil packed with iron, turquoise, galena, and silver is feeding some deeper need, some vision for myself for the coming year.
At the conclusion of our several hour ramble through these hills, still pockmarked by the short-lived extractive efforts of 1880s speculators, my companion and I find a moment of solitude and quiet near the trailhead. There’s a little shelter that’s calling to me; no more than two walls and a curved corrugated roof. It turns out to be a noon analemma sundial, an instrument that uses the sun’s changing height in the sky over the year to chart the location of true solar noon on an analemma, or figure eight. There feels like something auspicious about stumbling upon this marker of infinity on this, the eve of the solstice. I settle myself in the circular warmth of true solar noon, feeling anchored to the here and now for the first time in months.
The perfect place for a solstice meditation: the moon analemma sundial at Cerrillos Hills State Park.
My brain and heart are still full of other places, other moments. I’m surrounded by tea lights and flowers in the courtyard of the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum. I’m watching as the sun clears the pashmina of fog from the Welsh Hills on the porch of Tan-y-Deri at Taliesin. I’m sandwiched in a vinyl booth at a Quad Cities diner alongside three friends who worked there for a few summers back in the early 1970s. I’m racing the fading light back to my lodging at Taliesin West; the saguaros glowing an unearthly pink. I’m in your local indie bookstore, smiling fast, shaking hands, fixing my lipstick in some sliver of a mirror.
It’s taken me the last few weeks of unwinding and decompression to realize that the question was less what did I take from this experience and more what did I show up with in the first place?
Georgia O’Keeffe, upon returning from a trip to Hawaii in 1939 sponsored by the Dole pineapple company, remarked that, “Maybe the new place enlarges one’s world a little. Maybe one takes one’s own world along and cannot see anything else.” O’Keeffe and Frank Lloyd Wright certainly understood the ability of travel—of novel landscapes and strange encounters—to revitalize a creative practice grown stale or complacent. Sometimes you do have to run away to Fiesole or Bermuda to find your way back. But I share O’Keeffe’s suspicion that wherever you go, you’re bringing along your home with you. It’s that friction unique to travel of the known rubbing up against the unknown that sets loose all manner of unexpected, revealing, and not always welcome encounters with the shadow self—those parts of you that only show up in spaces of displacement and alienation. You really have to know which aquifer that deep, deep tap root leads you back to. Georgia knew. And so did Frank. Of the valley of his maternal clan in Wisconsin, he wrote in 1932, “I come back from the distant, strange, and beautiful places that I used to read about when I was a boy. . . with the feeling there is nothing anywhere better than this is.” That’s how I feel today, wandering the hills of Cerrillos, studded with juniper and piñon, prickly pear and cholla.
The rain will come, and all those jangling, foreign, unsettled moments will be absorbed into my being as the smell of petrichor rises from the soil. I’m thankful for it all; thankful for all of you following along on this ongoing journey through the proverbial long desert. I’m putting down roots again, finding my footing here in the high desert of northern New Mexico. There is home to tend and heart to mend and hearth to stoke.
In the next few weeks, there will be new events up on the website. I’m gently testing the waters, reconfiguring my approach. No more social media for a while, at least until I know I’m doing it for the right reasons. There will be more Dispatches, to be certain. Maybe sending out a few feelers to far-flung comrades in the hope of collaboration.
For now, I’m enjoying the radiant heat of the propane lamp, the quiet companionship of writing in silence with a friend.
Someone will tell me if the antler & bone theme in my office is getting out of hand, right?