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You know how I’m always posting photos from Taos Valley Overlook about five miles south of Ranchos de Taos, itself three miles south of Taos? The gorge, the ninety-mile views, all that?—there will be more of those coming up, but this is what’s behind me to the south when I take those other pictures. Not a bad place to hike, is it? Picuris Peak is the one in shadow, not the rocky one in front, and just beyond on the other side of the mountains is Picuris Pueblo, one of the smaller ones you don’t hear about so much. A couple of thousand years ago a tribe that lived more or less where you’re looking now—a little to the left, actually—decided to split up: some of them moved to what became Taos Pueblo, and the others went to Picuris. Yes, two thousand years ago. The Spaniards showed up here about four centuries ago. We came in ’99, although I only just now arrived in the full sense of the word.

It’s good to be somewhere, isn’t it? I’ve spent a considerable portion of the last fifteen years trying to be all kinds of places. Meanwhile, look at where I’ve been! I did not fuck up, in other words. The voices in my blood from childhood are simply wrong. Yesterday, while walking three and a half miles virtually all alone in this beautiful place, I felt flooded with joy. At one point I was startled to realize that the stream of thoughts inside my head for the previous few minutes had been a happy one without conditions. It took up my whole mind! The usual quiet nasty business wasn’t there.

I told my wife, and she said, “See? That’s how it is.” She’s been saying that for years, but I could never feel it.

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This is about where I was standing when I took the photo in the previous post. That’s a wild cherry tree blooming by the acequia. The cherries are tiny but taste just like the big ones in the stores or sold at the orchards in Velarde, but you have to get them before the western tanagers do. Which reminds me: putting up hummingbird feeders today! I’ll have shots of them and the expected orioles very shortly.

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The struggle is over, a new world’s been born. For some reason, spring is more important in my life than I remember from the past. At any rate, what you’re looking at is a view from the acequia to a neighbor’s house and across the valley of the Rio Grande del Rancho toward Taos and the mountains beyond. What an amazingly fine day today. Cool, breezy, deep.

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I was out there in that vastness earlier on a hike. The clouds hadn’t rolled in yet with their dragging rain, and I’d taken a different route down this time. Almost right away I spied someone jogging up the trail from the gorge. I hate meeting people on the trail, of course. Number one, they’re in my church, and number two, it feels talking to strangers on the phone at dinner time. But someone jogging against gravity deserves respect, so I stood up straight, relaxed, and prepared to greet whoever it was when he came within earshot.

There was something odd about the figure that approached me—the way he pumped his arms, perhaps, more in front of his chest than at his sides. As we drew closer, I could see he was short and stocky, about fifty, with a dark complexion and black hair combed straight back over his head. I thought he might be Greek or Italian. No hat, no sunglasses, no water bottle. He was wearing a kind of yellow satin jacket I’d never seen before. The edge of a salmon-pink shirt poked out a little from underneath. His pants were black, a light fleece material open at the bottom. He was running smoothly at a good clip and wasn’t out of breath or sweating. As we met, we shared a glance, exchanged hellos, and I could see that he was wearing flip-flops… Frankly, this astonished me. He passed smoothly by, in no alarm or obvious distress, running almost silently. I turned to stare at his retreating form and wondered what I’d seen.

When these things happen, I always remember where I am. A raven can be a shaman on a lark or mission. Brujos and brujas love to play tricks on kids and old dead hippies. Shape-shifters can be anywhere—if you hold this in your thoughts, you’ll notice more! What I saw today could be as simple as a foreign tourist who forgot to lock his car, or as wacko as an alien spy from outer space who didn’t get the mind control quite right.

It was a glorious walk, however. The kind of sunny but cool and dry affair where if you sweat, you never know it. For most of the three-and-a-half miles, I was completely alone. There are bright green tufts of grass appearing on the mesa, and I found bright red flowers in a protected arroyo. A solitary piñon jay startled me by squawking as it shot out from a juniper—I guess it was confused—and by then I’d already forgotten the funny guy in flip-flops and just assumed it was a bird.

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