The Land Remembered Me

I've been trying to get to Los Conchas for months. Too cold. A sick kid. Work pulling at my sleeve. Life doing what life does.

Today, I finally went.

The drive alone was a becoming. Thirty minutes of winding road through the Jemez, and then — the Valles Caldera opening wide, and a gasp escaping me before I even knew it was coming. Some places don't wait for you to be ready. They just arrive.

I pulled into my spot and felt it immediately: the land knew me. I greeted it. It greeted back. Not metaphorically — actually, in the way that a forest does when you arrive with your whole heart open.

The beings were everywhere. Moss in every shade of green imaginable — emerald, sage, gray-green, the deep almost-black of wet stone. Rocks ancient and unhurried. A creek singing to itself. Spanish moss. Butterflies and moths. Bees moving with such purposeful joy. Wild raspberry and wild strawberry weaving through the understory. Douglas fir, ponderosa pine, aspen — elders, all of them, holding centuries of quiet.

I walked the paths and felt the liminal quality ANFT talks about — that threshold space where ordinary time dissolves. There was a meadow that stopped me completely. I wanted to stay there forever. I think part of me did.

I brought Letty, my dog, and watched her be utterly, unambiguously in heaven. And I thought: well, so am I.

I touched the moss. Laid my body on a great moss-covered boulder and let it hold me. Took off my shoes and put my feet in the cold creek water and watched in complete awe as the light ricocheted off the current and threw shimmering reflections onto the canyon walls. It was the kind of beauty that makes you forget what year it is — and I did forget, until a passing hiker smiled at me, until a single plane crossed the sky and sent its sound reverberating through the rock.

I breathed with the land. I offered water I had breathed love and coherence and gratitude into, and I felt the exchange — not as performance, but as relationship. The real kind. The kind that heals.

I took fifty pictures and know that none of them captured it. That's okay. Some things live in the body instead.

I left feeling like a child who has just discovered that wonder is not something that goes away — only something we forget to look for. I felt held. Welcomed. Healed.

Los Conchas, you are my sanctuary. When I die, I want my ashes scattered across this whole glorious stretch of earth.

If you haven't been — go. Bring your whole self. The land will meet you there.