The Story
...and everything changed, forever.
After completing the first build in Reno my course was set. I had become, or rather had been returned to, somewhat of a feral animal. Paint-laden walls and artificial air evoked a primal, hair-raising sense of claustrophobia - touching the surface of a laptop felt wrong (I hadn't used a computer in two months) - and my heart kept balking (no, flat-out revolting) against my day job, societal goings-on, and anything that felt scripted (which was most things). I had allowed myself to go wild, and the thought of returning to what I had previously known as normal, daily life was impossible.
[In my search for more dirt, I had discovered Cornerstones, a non-profit organization whose work centers around historic preservation efforts in the Southwest. My heart, forever drawn to ancient ways and sacred places, was two paragraphs into an introductory email before my rational mind had had a chance to protest. I wanted to feel the places that kept the old ways alive.]
And so it was. A few days later, after a sunset blur of Utah's unwavering cliffs and the soft insistence of the Brazos, I arrived at the Manzanita casita in the thick of night. I had reached Chimayó, where life felt held in suspended time - where there was space for the first tendrils of my buried dreams to sieve through the larger story's patterned netting. In an instant, I was reeling - swimming in a mysterious elixir of coyote song and rose-draped archways, and my being, unburdening after a lifetime of semi-disembodied-living, didn't quite know how to be.
So I followed the heat of my tears into a pseudo sleep, emotions heaving and bucking like the stormy sea; pressed my burning cheek against the scratches etched in the painted floorboards, called to the spirits of the land for strength, for love - and surrendered to all things unseen.
When I woke hours later to the mewing of a furry friend pressing paws into the screen door, I knew with all of my being that no matter where this dirt road led: I was never turning back. I had been called here to remember how one truly lives, and that was the clearest feeling I had ever felt. I'd never felt so sure of anything in my entire life.
And so it was. In the first colorful bursts of New Mexican dawn, I was alive - and on my way to cast bricks in the sacred earth of the Plaza del Cerro, where I would receive a blessing in the words of an abuelo ('Eres una Chimayósa?' Are you a woman from Chimayó?). Directed by the heart to release all the ways I'd been hardened, I gathered the blessed dirt from El Santuario and witnessed, serendipitously, two tiny, grey feathers cradled in the portico - a gentle foretelling of the many deaths (symbolic and physical) soon to come.
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Read a bit about the history of Chimayó here.
If you are a stranger, if you are weary from the struggles in life, whether you have a handicap, whether you have a broken heart, follow the long mountain road, find a home in Chimayó. —G. Mendoza
