In Search of Magic
I can’t keep track of time in this love bubble. What is happening to me? I am becoming completely lost in this place that feels oddly right. This space of nothing. Everything moves through it at an unusually slow pace—slow, but fast. It’s a contradiction, like when they say you have to go slow in order to go fast.
These days I ride on a prayer, especially since making a promise to this wide-open desert of New Mexico to stay here. Given my background as a journalist and photo-journalist, I decide to interview and write articles on Debbie Jaramillo, the first female mayor—and definitely the first Latina mayor—of Santa Fe since it was inhabited by the Spanish 500 years ago. I send my articles to major Latina magazines, which eagerly accept them. But for the most part, I am content living day to day, dancing, making love (with Richard), and going nowhere, really.
But then, suddenly this bubble bursts, and I sc
ream out, banging the floor in rage, asking why in the hell I’m out here. I feel lost and uncomfortable with this feeling. I want something magical to happen, for some insight to explain this odd stop in the middle of the desert. I want to learn from a shaman or someone who can show me how to work through the blocks that keep me resisting the magic I believed in as a child.
From seven to eleven years old, I used to sit in the fields of Spain and pray to God. For some innate reason, I believed in magic, in an invisible world, even though I was raised with little religion. Later, in my mid-twenties, when I danced with my partner, Stefan, I also experienced how we are creators of the magic that exists between us and our relationship to the eternal. I lived that magic, but now, here, in a land so similar to the high mesa terrain of central Spain, I’m lost.
I sit still with myself and ask what it is I really want. I came out west because I longed for more land, more humanity. I wanted love. I had also hoped for home where I didn’t have to fight to live a spiritual life, and where I could find wisdom in the ancient ones.
Do you believe in magic?
Michelle Adam is an experienced writer, teacher, and healer. She recently published her novel, Child of Duende, after twenty-plus years as a magazine and newspaper writer. Her articles have appeared in The Hispanic Outlook in Higher Education Magazine; Hibernia Magazine, an Irish magazine; Vista Magazine, a Hispanic insert of major national newspapers; and multiple other publications.
Michelle has also been a photographer and artist; has taught middle school students Spanish for the past dozen years; and has worked as a healer and shaman. Michelle has created healing and teaching circles of song and sound, assisting others in awakening the spirit of the earth, “duende,” within them, and creating a space for the celebration of life.
