My annual January visit to Santa Fe to cavort with Sarah, my best friend from graduate school, carried more significance this year. Not just because the sepia-toned landscapes, crisp mountain air and crazy-blue-bright skies excite and relax me at the same time but also because, following a riotous autumn, I had some answers I needed to torture out of my own treacherous heart, and that traitor required nothing short of extraordinary rendition.
Allow me to explain. In September, I relinquished every lifelong notion I held about what kind of grownup I would be: I left my husband of five years and stumbled face-first into an intense, brief, painful affair. And now instead of stable adulthood in my early thirties, financially and socially I’ve landed unceremoniously in my twenties. Unlike my 20-year-old self, though, my heart and face bear exposure to significant amounts of passion, loss, fear and risk, and my mind bears the wisdom that comes from having purchased pleasure with pain.
I faced all these “What do I do now?” questions, and I hoped Santa Fe and Sarah had the answers.
Picture Santa Fe in January, its tiny Corazon Sagrado of a downtown surrounded by galleries, shops and trails that scatter and disappear into open desert laid bare beneath a broad sky. After making appropriate amounts of single-girl mischief and acquiescing to each gastronomical, choreographic and karaokic urge, Sarah and I left the city to tour the New Mexican countryside in my low-rent rental car.
A desertscape punctuated by alien plants, shadow-harbored snow and eerie rock formations beckoned us to the mountainous horizon.
Our first stop was El Santuario de Chimayo, an ancient sanctuary constructed from the earth’s detritus of wood, mud and vines.
Replete with the garish aesthetics of Southwestern religiosity, the site offered a pastiche of clashing cultures: native beliefs, na
This article appears in Apr 7-13, 2010.