I write from Taos, where I swear there is both a yard sale and fresh eggs on every corner. It’s a yearly tradition we call an inverse family reunion: instead of gathering with extended family, we split into our own orbit. A family of two learning how to be two separate ones. So Taos becomes a place where I can go to be alone for multi-day stretches, with no contact, as he is at a technology-free summer camp, an experience unique to the rest of the year. It’s a slow-paced situation with a fair amount of hat shops and taxidermy. Sometimes, after twenty-five years in Flagstaff, it’s nice just to see a different sort of tree.
The construction here is all crumbly, like if you stumbled across it, it was because you hadn’t read the room. Mushrooms spill out of a bucket. A local says the phrase “old school Taos, where people did things out of love.” Our geographical makeup is somewhat similar; we have the same elevation, and they have a ski area, but I find it greener and has more water. And it seems so much more southwest here. New Mexico is Arizona’s best-kept secret. I didn’t know much about it till 2017. Everything here is Mexican chocolate or Red Chile vodka. I’ve been taking care of llamas and chickens, and across from me are goats and little chihuahuas that don’t like that I’m here. Nick Flynn is going to be headlining the writing festival here in a few weeks, and I’m sad to be missing it. I’m less of a hiker these days, but I can urban stroll for hours.
It’s a practice for me, training wheels of my own. I know that in six summers, when he’s grown, I’ll be in Taos mode for life, still walking alone, remembering what this version of me did with the space. I’ll look back on these weeks to remember what she did and what she’ll do. They say 75% of time with your child has been completed by age 12, and he’s halfway there. My son is in a teenage chapter, but I’m more grateful for him than anything else that could ever occur in this life.
It’s all strange, so it makes sense to be doing this strange thing in a town that is also strange. I think it’s a little far-fetched to say I’m inhabiting my rhythms. Once you have a kid, you can kiss those rhythms goodbye. But I do remember that I like taking photographs and noticing things. I’m not so interested in random conversations with locals; those never seem to come to me, but I do enjoy the visual aspect of what shows up around me.
After I’m all walked out, I rarely know what to do with myself. My body’s muscle memory insists there’s something urgent, a school pickup, dinner prep, a bedtime routine, but none of these exist here, in this alternate dimension of Taos. There is, however, the best chocolate shop in the Southwest, which contributes to feelings of delusion and makes me feel like I’m living in some weird second life. I can stay out as late as I like, but I’m not much of a drinker, so I take books and writing that needs editing to bars and have lemonade. The only thing that feels familiar is working from home, which I also did last summer. It’s nice, though, people here don’t know about the fire, and when they see me, they don’t say “so how is…everything?” Which, of course, I appreciate, but here I can just be myself without any information. The idea of feeling anonymous has always resonated with me, especially while living in cities like New York. It’s just such a tension reliever.
This landscape has always pulled artists toward it, like something in the light knows more than you do. Georgia O’Keeffe called the region “more sky than you have” and made it her own mythology. D.H. Lawrence came to write here, Ansel Adams to photograph, Dennis Hopper to lose and remake himself. The Taos art colony goes back to the 1890s, but the draw is older, stranger.
Someone on the street in Flag recently was very keen to express to tourists that they weren’t church bells but courthouse bells. To be honest, I never knew this, but I’m not sure that our judicial system is any more comforting than a religious institution, but I guess that guy thought so.
I think about bells ringing out for justice and what that may sound like. The place I’m house-sitting in even has its bell tower. What would ringing out for justice even sound like, and could we recognize it if it did? Would we say, oh yes, those are the justice bells?
It reminds me of something out of a Brautigan novel, whom I love for his visual nature as well.
Florence once had a literal justice bell, the Campana della Giustizia, rung to call citizens to civic assembly. In Warsaw, bells rang out during the 1944 uprising, calling people to resist. In Selma, church bells rang as marchers reached the Capitol steps. The blues have always been a kind of justice bell, too, a grief-howl shaped into sound you could dance to.
What if protests weren’t signs on street corners with honking applause? What if justice had its rhythm to walk to, a howl in the night or birdsong in the morning? What does it mean that we don’t have that sound now? What are we listening for?
It may not be loud at all. It could be the quiet running of a stream, the silence at a Quaker meeting. It would be trendy to write about walking away from what doesn’t serve us, but I don’t believe in that at all. Sirens nailed it when they talked about how showing up for what doesn’t suit us is the very act of love and justice. So be careful when told to walk away from everything that doesn’t serve you. That sounds like ultimate individualistic bullshit to me. Whatever it is, the adage used to be ‘be careful what you wish for,’ but I leave you with this: in the age of so much information coming at you like meteor showers, be careful what you hear. There may be distant bells on the hill, somewhere, signaling something a little more unheard of and true.
