ByMichelle Adam
The surrounding Sangre de Cristo (Blood of Christ) mountains, roads, and buildings that make up Santa Fe, this “City of Faith” in the high desert of New Mexico, are now covered in more than a foot of snow. This small city slows down, while inside homes, fires burn, warming old adobe walls, and filling the…
ByMichelle Adam
I’m sitting by the fire in my temporary Santa Fe home in New Mexico’s high desert. Back from a brief trip to California, I’m reading Malidoma Some’s book, Of Water and Spirit. Malidoma’s words transport me to his village of Burkina Faso, West Africa, where he grew up and was later kidnapped by Jesuits who…
ByMichelle Adam
Have you ever felt that a part of you belongs to an ocean, a mountain, a river…that you are that place, and her spirit lives in you wherever you go…that you are made of that essence as you travel the world bridging the love of one far distant mountain to another, or of rivers seeking…
ByMichelle Adam
The fire inside my new home in Santa Fe, an hour north of Albuquerque, is bright and warm, unlike the night sky. It’s colder in this town, nestled inside the Sangre de Cristo (Blood of Christ) mountains, about 2,000 feet higher in elevation than Albuquerque. But I’m here for two months, in a home I’m…
ByMichelle Adam
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…
ByMichelle Adam
I celebrate my 28th birthday in Albuquerque with little fanfare. I’m a year older, and I feel the pressure to become someone, especially in dance, while I’m still young. I’m running out of time to train in dance, which I fell in love with two years ago in New York City. My plan had been…
ByMichelle Adam
I dream another native dream. Men dance in a Native American ceremony and pray for the spirit of my friend’s brother on the East Coast. I feel sad as I watch. I sense I am holding onto something. I have an attachment to my friend and a dance we shared and performed together before I came…
ByMichelle Adam
AMIDST CHANGE AND UPHEAVAL, AWAKEN DUENDE! Dear Readers…I am taking a break from my regular blog to share parts of my recently published novel, Child of Duende, and to write about the spirit of DUENDE. May it inspire you! As birds court the earth with their love songs, and we renew our vows of change…
ByMichelle Adam
I close my eyes and I feel clouds envelop the mountains around me. They are inside of me. The stones turn to red and then pure white. I scream out to the mountains and become a part of their mass. My hand runs along the curves of the pines, the yellow leaves of autumn’s trees;…
ByMichelle Adam
Richard tells me it may take a shaman, a medicine man, two years to calm me down. It seems his way of warning me of the dangers of my full energy—the danger of trying to direct the flow too much. I do feel fairly out of control, and yet, I seem calmer about it than I usually am. Maybe it’s…
ByMichelle Adam
How long will it take for our indigenous selves, lost so long ago to the empire of greed and power, to come home? There’s anger among indigenous people—especially among those who grew up with a sense of what it’s like to have an intact relationship with the earth—of what white man (or people of European…
ByMichelle Adam
I’m in the middle of New Mexico. I wrestle with restlessness late at night after days of looking for work and a place to live that’s more creative or affordable than staying with Judith, my current housemate. My challenge is not knowing how long I’ll be here in this desert city of Albuquerque. My plan…