Places of the Soul

I have been back in my home in Taos, New Mexico for two weeks and three days now but it is not what I anticipated. I have changed. I am not the same person who left for Arizona last September. Sometimes I feel as if I were living in a time warp and came back to the past.

And yet it isn't the past, its an entirely different environment than the one I left when I moved to Arizona. This occurred in stages. When I was first in Cottonwood, Arizona I longed for Taos, and missed the familiar places, the taste of roasted green chili, the quaint and sometimes irritating main road through town with road construction that never stops and never seems to make much difference, and of course my own adobe walls and the precious plants in my garden.

The Pueblo seems about the same, my partners house is the way we left it with his son still in it and so on. Now Taos and I don't dance to the same tune as we once did. The things that used to make me feel at home now irritate me. I have another perspective. Of course this story isn't over. My garden is back in shape, the phenomenal quiet power that I feel radiating down from the sky is still there as we drink our morning coffee and interact with the very active wildlife of Ravens, Magpies, Starlings, Prairie Dogs, local cats and dogs and occasional Coyote.

Taos was never kind to me although it tolerated me and I got away with an economically precarious lifestyle for an unusually long time. But it was my greatest test in life as well. I realize now that my memories are laced with a delicious but dangerous drug that I barely survived, although I did so with with some pride in my ability to survive some perilous tests. Taos is a "Medicine" place in the Native American sense. But that medicine came at a great price. However, I seem to need a change in Medicine now. I have gone through the initiation and it is time to use what I have learned and to retrieve the parts of my soul that were scraped off here and there in my journey through the wild brush of Taos.

Arizona was and is a new chapter. Not to replace the Taos experience but to take it forward to another level of life. It has been a way of extending my soul, reinvigorating my creativity, and discovering other perspectives. Literally, I needed new scenery in my life. With this discovery I want to bring these two parts together in the blend of my future.