The Georgia O’Keefe/D.H. Lawrence/Mabel Dodge Luhan Disease
By Dear Brown People of Northern New Mexico,
Please let me move into your communities so I can find meaning in my spiritually dead consumerist life. I will still consume your cultures, driving up property values, and forcing many of you to sell your land. But you can sell me jewelry at the Indian Market in Santa Fe so it’s in your interest to let this happen. I will also show how well I am fitting in by wearing ridiculous clothing, including turquoise jewelry, hoop skirts, and a lot of buckskin with fringe.
Love,
Upper-class White People of the World
As a former resident of New Mexico, I could get very irritated at how whites objectified the Hispanos and Native Americans of New Mexico in order to fulfill their own desires. It’s as much a part of a colonialist project as an eastern mining company dispossessing people of their land in order to send the minerals back to eastern factories. Admittedly, I might have also been part of that colonial project, but at least I was aware of it. Plus I didn’t wear turquoise.
I write this now (and I used to write about this a lot) not only because I am going to New Mexico on Thursday, but because I’ve read 2 articles in the past 2 days that touched that very cranky spot I have when it comes to these issues.
Even the weather seemed like an English summer — gauzy, hazy, often with a low lid of thin cloud filtering the sun. Yet at the same time, both field and weather were subservient to something else, an atmosphere, a mood, a feeling I hadn’t known in a long time. My walks through the field would stir a familiar peace. Maybe it was the peace of land long inhabited, long farmed and fructified by human presence — land where humans and the earth had established a lasting friendship. After at least a millennium of human use by the Pueblo Indians and Spanish farmers, this whole part of the plain of Taos had a settled, benevolent air. Or maybe it was a youthful love for land reviving in me. Plutarch, after all, said youths must spend time in nature or they won’t grow up right.
Things happened in the field — small things maybe, but they took me out of my nostalgic realm of childhood memories back into the unfamiliar present. Once I tried to step over a snake lying across the path, dark blue, silent, warming itself on a patch of sun-heated dirt. Suddenly it sensed me, and instead of zipping itself away, snapped toward me. I leapt back, jumping several feet in alarm, as it hissed away through the dry grass.
Another time I heard a rhythmic beating as I approached the field, and high-pitched cries. A circle of Pueblo men were sitting deep in the long grass and stayed there all afternoon with their drums and rattles, singing their song to the field.
One day, walking back from the store on a sunny afternoon, overcome by sleepiness, I decided on a whim to climb up to a fork in a mighty cottonwood, where I lodged myself in and lay back against the trunk. Next thing I knew I was waking from a vivid dream in which an old tribal man had been standing right under the tree, calling up to me. “Sunshine! Tree!” he had called, as if giving me a new name. I could have sworn he had really been there.
In England there had been nothing like Taos Mountain. The field offered an unobstructed view of the mountain. I’d never seen anything like it, an awesome massif, a clump of peaks, an agglomeration of several mountains. Almost a range unto itself, it stood there, a Precambrian megalith thrust from the plain, a word of God made manifest and irrevocable, a reminder somehow of what really mattered. It put your life in perspective, that mountain.
Christ on a crutch.
As the cup gets passed, most people stare into the cup, touch the water, and then take a sip. A couple of people say a couple of words, but mostly the circle is quiet. When the cup comes to me, I mimic those before me. The water reflects the gray sky and green aspen leaves. When I touch it, I’m shocked by how cold it feels. I take a sip. It tastes a little bit sweet. I’ve never had water that hasn’t passed through some kind of filtration system, and I’m surprised it doesn’t taste more like mud or algae. Without thinking, I utter a “thank you” into the cup. Even this early in the morning, the dry air has made my mouth and throat feel sandy, and just a small sip of the cool spring water is refreshing.
When the water gets back to Seth, he starts to sing what I later learned is a Native American chant about the way water can flow both gently and violently, how it can do as much harm as good. He repeats the song, over and over again, and soon everyone else is singing, too. I close my eyes and let the sound wash over me like the rain we need here so badly. I find that I am singing along too, thinking about how this mountain is so fortunate to have any water at all in the middle of such a dry climate.
And then it hits me: No one is asking for more water here.
Everyone is simply thanking the spring, the mountain, the earth, for what water we do have. We aren’t doing some kind of weird rain dance hoping the unrelenting gray clouds will finally drop some moisture. We aren’t coaxing the gods to give us something. We are just saying thank you, and I wonder why I had never said thank you for water before. It seemed so simple, so straightforward. I mean, I did owe my life to the stuff.
I love the environment of New Mexico very much. But I will burn down every tree in the state of New Mexico and then throw myself into the flames before I dance with a bunch of hippies in a geodesic dome, of that you can rest assured.
Well, time to go buy a new suitcase so I can fill it with turquoise and trinkets to remember my deeply authentic experience in New Mexico.