Rio Grand & Grass

Fires Burn, Waters Cool

Summer fires burn the South West

The Wallow in Arizona started May 29, total of 538,049 acres.

Pacheco started June 18, about 10 miles North in the Santa Fe Mountains, right now it’s at 10,250 acres.

Las Conchas started June 26 about 45 miles North West of Santa Fe near Los Alamos Laboratory, right now its at 121,248 acre

Over a month of smoke in Santa Fe where I live

I’m writing this in Southern New Mexico’s, Truth or Consequences. It’s now my third day away from Santa Fe and wondering if I have woken up from a bad hallucination, like what ever I was on is out of my system now. I can’t quite grasp why I was weeping spontaneously for a week. And then I remember the moment it really started, Mattilda captures it well describing it in such a way that my heart can start racing again. Up until that moment all the disasters and the suffering of the world felt out of reach, I couldn’t completely fathom the horrors that people are living everywhere on this earth right now. But there it was, in the dark of the night it seemed like only a few miles away, orange flame tendrils, but not just over there I could feel them burning something inside my own heart, I might explode, “My Mother is burning!” circled through my blood like a mantra.

I have known I’m asleep and I would sometimes wonder what it would take to break through this wall that had been built to protect myself from others suffering, created why? At some point on my spiritual journey with a guru, my own feelings denied as unimportant or inappropriate I also stopped feeling for others. How ironic to have spent all those years with a guru who embodies the divine Mother, All Compassionate One and I her disciple could feel nothing not even for my beloved earth.

I was flooded with memories of my first trip through New Mexico in the late 80’s, falling in love with the earth here like I never had before. The red earth and the red dress of La Vigen de Guadalupe became one. Curious as I’m writing now I remember hearing a clear message from Her, “the only way you will make change in this world is to change yourself.” Until that moment I had been politically active, in anti racism issues on campus, my own mother a nuclear free nut.

I wonder if I have fulfilled that call inward I heard way back then; for now I am feeling Her say clearly “its time to be active and rise up!”

It has been astounding to me that I have lived in New Mexico for 21 yeas and never took the existence of Los Alamos Laboratory very seriously. Maybe I thought those watch dog people on the corner of Cerrillos and St Francis were crazy like my mother, isn’t the threat gone now, why are they still obsessing over what they are doing at that lab? But I would always honk my horn in support.

Now I’m wondering why they’re not in the street and I want to be out there with them! It seems a ripe time to be active with all the natural disasters testing the soundability of anything nuclear: Fukushima Japan, Wolf Creek Missouri, and here as fires approached a stockpile of old drums filled with plutonium. And Now, Obama administration is proposing to build a plutonium warhead core factory in Los Alamos, why not right?! NM already has the main storage facility for all this nuclear waste in the Carlsbad Caverns of southern NM. Oh right, that’s why the nuke free people were out on the streets all those years ago, to stop the trucks from transporting all this shit. There is no safe way to dispose of it, no one wants it so why are we making more of it!

Kind of feels like a foreshadow that I recently joined my first book group ever and we read, About A Mountain, where the author describes in detail the extent of a clean up that would need to happen if a truck carrying waist should ever get in an accident. Basically might as well put NM under a bubble and get all the people out before that happens!

My lungs were burning from all the smoke. The lungs hold grief; I have smoked cigarettes at different times in my life so that I wont feel old grief. This time there was no holding back the tears, and I prayed that my tears would turn to rain, so dry. And behind my house as the fire burns in the mountains, huge trucks are moving sand in the dry riverbed, reshaping it for greater erosion control. I feel surrounded by destruction, so many trees lost, smoke from the fires and dust from the river fill my home.

My mind is unsettled is it time to leave or stay, go far or close, long trip or short? Waiting to know…

And in the midst of it all I find my lips kissing another. Bodies entwined, internal waters bursting forth and I dream of all the women in the world that aren’t releasing their fountains and I think surely that would bring an end to drought all over this planet.

On the day I am to finally leave Santa Fe for some lung relief, I go on my morning walk as usual in the dry riverbed and found a dead raven laying there mummified, blessing my journey today with the magic to shift consciousness.

And as my dog and I drove south and entered smoke free skies, my being felt lighter, prayers started to tumble out. Felt right that I had chosen to stay in NM where my feet could still touch the land I love.

Seeing the green on the edges of the Rio Grand my dry eyes filled with the moistness of my souls longings, this is what a river is meant to look like, I had forgotten.

Stopped to pee and was greeted by the smell of a dead badger, its belly split open, guts dried out like a mound of red sand. The smell traveled south with us for about 20 minuets along with one fly.

It is hot here in T or C so I wake early to find a place to walk along the Rio Grand; my river would connect to this one if it ever flows again.

So as I walk next to her I feel home, and imagine how it must have been like this once along the Santa Fe, controlled now with dams for drinking water and forest fires.

Dog is happy, chasing frogs and lizards. She must have tuff feet, there are huge thorny branches everywhere. I giggle out loud with a startle every time a frog squeaks before lopping into the water.

Cows greet us in the road and at waters edge.

Four vultures flew out revealing one owl feather glowing in a salt cedar grove. Continued to follow the vultures down river, watched them taking their morning sunbaths.

Death sitting in sun

all is revealed 

Driving south




My guard dog happy in pink



Driving to Rio Grand