Setting luminarias at the DeGrazia gallery in Tucson.
The prompt today in the Reverb10 project is healing. The prompt asks: What healed you this year? That's easy - my trip to the southwest. It happened at the end of a year that I spent every month traveling to various parts of the world - a goal I'd set for myself at the beginning of the year - and, despite my borderline obsessive love of travel, I was tired. My brain was full.
We were in Tucson over Thanksgiving, and it was simply gorgeous. The wide open landscape of the Sonoran desert and the scale of the mountains helped to give me back my breath, but the single most important element was the light. Living in New York City, I feel as though I am always in the shadows (like Batman's Gotham), even when it's 90 degrees outside. It's easy to forget about the natural world when you're constantly in motion, rushing through cities, airports, and airplanes. So, healing didn't happen over a long period of time - it happened in a flash, one afternoon when we were driving from Tucson to Bisbee, and I realized I was breathing.
My goal at the beginning of 2010 was to travel at least once a month. My goal for 2011, to answer the question "How will you be healed in 2011?", is to spend more time in the southwest.
It's long been a travel dream of mine to spend the holiday season in the southwest, particularly Santa Fe. I imagine strolling through town on clear, starry evenings with mesquite-scented air, a cup of hot mexican chocolate in hand. Waking early to trek to Taos for skiing, and recuperating at Ten Thousand Waves.
Exactly, almost, as described in this NY Times piece:
"FIRST, there is the smell. Perhaps nothing defines Santa Fe at Christmas so much as the piquant scent of piñón wood in the clear night air, the temperature hovering in single digits, the smoke an enveloping garland of warmth extending from faux-brick hearths in modest doublewides to sculptured kiva fireplaces in the corners of art galleries on Canyon Road."
