Oh my...over a week has passed.

I am floating a few feet above the ground encased in this fragile bubble with it's swirling eddies of color. I am inside- high on the way that I feel- but afraid that this irridescent film may pop. I didn't expect this to happen to me, really, when I decided to travel halfway across the face of our continent to find out if I had the stuff-to find out if indeed I was a writer.

I arrive in New Mexico to a landscape that laughs at my insecurities, with its vast stretches of dry foreboding desert. The desert is speckled with clumps of sage brush and juniper, no spreading expanses of green, just tiny fistfuls of defiance that have somehow punched their way up through the mean and arid earth. The broad desert is encircled-but way off in the distance- by layers of rugged purple mountains that bound the flat dryness. It is a landscape where you can see forever and the lobelia sky caps it all like a dome.The air is so thin and clean and clear, with clouds that dwarf the mountains, clouds grander and puffier than ones I have ever seen here at home. It is a landscape that makes you look up and around, no trees or tall buildings to cramp your vista. And it begs you- in all its vastness- to look in. You must. You must- or you may float away.

As I drive along, I find that the radio annoys me- it interferes with my ability to process my amazement at the space I have entered. I find that I am not even talking aloud to myself, as I typically do, as words cannot be found. I want to register fully-with my eyes and ears.

As I near Abiquiu, the landscape changes dramatically. Red rock canyons hug in so very close to the road that I literally gasp- like they had been told that I need to be bounded at the edges somehow-or I might just fly off my tether. The road snakes up the side of the rising landscape and I enter a land of pink and purple and sand and orange cliffs and canyons and feel even smaller than I had before; this is a real Dorothy moment if ever there was one.

I begin to see green, but no expanses of green-it runs like a broad ribbon across the valleys fed by the Chama River. I begin to see evidence of people-small adobe farms with rusty dusty pick up trucks- each proudly announcing its existence with a wide board propped up on two tall posts. The boards are hand carved and burned into the fibrous wood with names like 'Cielo Y Sol', 'Crossed Arrow Ranch' and 'Broken Saddle Ranch'. Each pink and sun baked clay structure seems to be fitted out with what you might expect- wire fences and wide swinging corral gates. The horses look perfectly content to stay in the shade-to munch and huddle under the cottonwood trees. If they could, they might tell their ranchers...really, guys...fences aren't needed. I too have fallen in love with cottonwood trees and the way they whisper and shush when the canyons breathe-and I am soon to discover how they offer such glorious shade to my pinking skin...

To Be Continued....