A Reflection on Subsistence, Protection, and Relationship

By Christina Trout

Cohesion and integration is applying the Natural Being framework as a living
pattern language to my own life. I’m demonstrating real subsistence, not
commodity farming, but a reciprocal relationship with life, death, food, soil.
This is a personal story, a love letter to little Miss Opal, one of my OG goats, one of
the first four, one of my teachers.

She was the first to get pregnant. But her labor stopped. The kids inside her had
died. That was a $2,000 ticket to help her survive that loss. There was a lot of soul
searching... a lot of self-judgment about how I handled it, knowing for one, she
was already six years old with no pregnancies in her youth, so at risk. I choose to try for a herd. From 4, I went to 15, now 14. And soon, the herd will expand with
younger nannies.

Now, a few years later, she's facing something similar, Maybe carrying dead kids
again, at an older, more fragile age. Her back end, always a little weak, has been
failing. She's in pain.

And today, I made the decision to take her to a small, local butchery here in El
Rito, New Mexico, an FDA-supported small butchery, to have her slaughtered,
butchered, and packaged.

It sounds harsh.

But when you really know an animal, when they've lived a full life by your side,
grazing, negotiating, loving, living, you realize that kindness sometimes looks
different than what we were taught.

Goats are master negotiators.
They don't thrive by being house pets.
They learn through their herd, from the elders, from each other.

They are deeply relational animals, and to raise them well means to allow them to
live as goats, not as ornaments. I made the decision to keep a billy goat, Forest,
intact and not isolated. To let the herd live as a real herd.

Yes, it increased risk for the older does.
Yes, it led to hard decisions like this one.
But it honored their natural life, their natural being.

And Opal?

She lived joyfully. She was a curious, affectionate goat, flirty with Forest, even in
her old age. Forest was gentle with her. They had a love, not just an instinct. It was
obvious. She sought him out and got jealous too.

In these final months, her pain made itself known.
And so, today, I walked her home.
I won't pretend this was easy for me.
But oddly... I don't feel tragic or emotional.
I feel grateful.

I feel more sadness for the shift in our relationship than for the loss of her life.
Because I know she was ready. I know she was hurting.
And now, she will become part of my soil, my meals, my living memory.

I will use her hide.
I will honor her meat.
I will speak of her as a teacher.

Goats have taught me more about being human and being in relationship than
many people have.

They don't judge or hold grudges. They remember everything, especially what
they have won in negotiations.

They don't care if you are doing it the "right" way.

They always give you honest feedback through the relationship itself.

I have been judged for how I live with my goats — going mobile, living simply,
feeding them with what the land provides instead of falling into the commercial
feed cycles.
I've been told I shouldn't have animals unless I have wealth (translated to house,
pen, zoning, odd social norms and rules).But this system I'm building, this subsistence economy of relationship, is proof that another way is possible.

Because of them, I have goat milk, goat soil, goat meat, and goat medicine.
Because of them, I know I can adapt.
Because of them, I know abundance is not the same as money.

When I delivered Opal to the butchery today, it was not a corporate, industrial
machine.
It was a small, old-world operation, a homy office filled with family photos, paper
stacks, and trophies from local competitions.

It felt human.
It felt real.
And when I said goodbye to Opal, she wasn't afraid.
Not trembling, not panicking.
She was curious. Calm.

Driving home, a tiny funnel of tumbleweed, like a mini tornado, rose from the
ground and with a burst of expression, scattered the tumbleweed in pieces, a little
dancing dust devil, with attitude. Opal had attitude just like it and in Opal’s
transition, she may know what I think of tumbleweed.
It felt like Opal’s spirit whispering: I’m still here. I'm okay. I’m free.

There is often a cynical voice in me questioning ‘magical thinking’ or projections in
general, but this one felt real in my body. I thought, if Opal was set free at that
moment, I can expect a call. Sure enough, when back in range, maybe 30 minutes
later, I was called with the bad news, her meat is not safe to eat given the
condition of her organs. No dead babies. Simply time by her health and condition.
I asked for the hide and the skull, the meat to be chopped to feed my
shepherd-husky mix, who also shepherds the herd. Reciprocity in motion.

​I will brain-tan the hide with my father who knows how.
She was the softest goat to pet, the most sensitive, the sassiest in a quiet
determined way,
like the force of tumbleweed riding the wind.

Closing Reflections

Today, Opal taught me,
Subsistence is relational.
Protection is relational.
Life and death, beginnings and endings, are not separate from the garden we walk
every day.
Walking our own gardens, walking with our animals, our mistakes, our choices, is
how we learn.
Not from textbooks.
Not from perfect plans.
But from life itself.
​
Opal, my old teacher.
Thank you.

When I asked Susan Martin, pictured above, what prompted her to join this potluck, she pointed out that “connection and community are more important now, than ever.”

​Approximately 100 visitors came from local communities beyond Abiquiu such as El Rito, Medanales and Santa Fe. One guest, however, drove in from Colorado. Wahidullah Mujahid and Rafaat Ludin worked together in Afghanistan where Wahidullah served as the Quality Control Manager in one of Rafaat’s US government-funded projects. He eventually moved to Colorado in 2017, after Rafaat sponsored his SIV (Special Immigration Visa). This was Wahidullah’s first visit to Dar al Islam. He hopes to come back and participate in future MILA programs, a Muslim family retreat that has taken place each year in Abiquiu since 2004.

Post-lunch activities kept both children and adults busy at the playground, soccer field, and archery range where Lorie’s outdoor skills came in very handy. She guided participants on the use of bows and arrows, as well as safety considerations, making the archery activity the clear winner in terms of drawing in young visitors.

By Jessica Rath

For our interview, Quentin Wilson invited me to the house that he shares with his wife Maria: a beautiful, spacious adobe structure. Sunlight streamed through the large windows and provided ample light for an indoor arboretum with tropical flowers: bougainvillea and poinsettia were in full bloom. They moved here in 1970, shortly after their first son was born. The Mesa Vista High School is within walking distance, and both Quentin and Maria worked as teachers there. Quentin taught math and science there for two years, and after that he started teaching trade-related mathematics in El Rito at Northern New Mexico College, which was a technical vocational school at the time.

​After that, Quentin got into building. He procured a contractor’s license and started building houses, demonstrating the different ways one can build with adobe:  the glass needs to be on the south side, so that the building will be mostly warmed by the sun.

“So you're sitting in the middle of my system,” Quentin explained. “The glass lets the sunlight in. It migrates across the room, and it's stored in these walls. And that's what adobe does better than any other common material on the planet, because it has the ability to store heat.”

​Quentin continued: “Compared to rock, stone, concrete, or brick,  adobe does one thing that's different: it's very slow to warm up, and it's slow to return the heat to us. So when the sun goes down and it gets cooler in here, the heat starts coming out of the walls. During the daytime the heat is being driven into the walls, and then at night, it starts coming back. If this were concrete, the heat moves too fast, and it would just go in quickly, and in a couple of hours it would be gone. But with adobe, we get about a ten-hour time frame, it'll be next morning before the building starts getting cold. So that's the basics of passive solar adobe, and the two go together so well it’s just one word: ‘solaradobe’,  first coined by Mark Chalom.”

From 1995 until 2010, Quentin was teaching the  Adobe Program in El Rito at Northern New Mexico College. “The program that we came up with was a year long. It taught people how to build a house from foundation to roof, and if they had another year, we covered working with the government, working with insurance, contracting, licensing, dealing with inspectors, and all of the other things that go on around getting a house built.”

The students who stayed for two years got an Associates in Science degree in construction, with a major in Adobe. If they were there just for one year, they got a certificate in Adobe Construction. During this time, among other constructions, he and his students built eight little domes, such as the domes at Abiquiú. In 2010 Quentin retired.

I wanted to learn more about adobe bricks, what they’re made of.

​“The perfect adobe is just sand and clay,” Quentin pointed out.  “The secret formula is 30% clay and 70% sand, and that makes a perfect adobe. The sand actually gives the brick its strength, and the clay holds it together. And on a piece of property, you find you've got clay on top and organic things such as grass, and that's what you want to get away from, you move it to the side and get down to where you've got clay and sand.”

Adobe buildings can be found almost anywhere in the world, I learned. Because I had mentioned that I grew up in Germany, Quentin asked me to guess how many adobe homes might be found in Germany? I was certain there were none, that I had never seen any. Well. I soon found out that I was dead wrong.

“One day I was at a conference in former East Berlin,” Quentin told me. “This was around 2000, not too long after the wall had come down, at a big conference with stadium seating and about 400 people. And there's a young man  up on the podium, and he says, ‘We have discovered that there are about 50,000 earthen homes in Germany.’ Next, this stately gentleman stands up with a blue suit and rimless glasses and thinning white hair, and he said, ‘Pardon me, there are 2 million earthen homes in central Germany alone.’ What do you say?” Well, to say I was surprised is putting it mildly… Frankly, I couldn’t believe it. I had never seen anything resembling an adobe building in Germany.

​Quentin resumed: “In Thuringia, one of the  German states, there are many adobe houses now.  Sometimes the actual structure of the house is half timbers, where they put up a frame of timbers, and the adobe bricks are only the infill. They tend to use adobe more often than they use stone for the infill.”

Of course, now I recognized them!  In German they're called Fachwerk houses. One can find them all over Germany, in smaller towns and rural areas. I had no idea they were built with adobe!

​“In the US, we call this half timber construction,” Quentin confirmed.  “If it's true half timber, they build the house with a timber frame, and many of the elements will be vertical, but sometimes you have one that's at an angle, so it'll form a triangle and then the adobe goes in between. Sometimes they put small stones in between, but they're put together not with cement mortar, but with a clay based mud mortar. Lehm is the word for clay. So Lehm Bau, I believe, is a clay house.”

Absolutely,  Lehm is the German word for clay.

And not only Germany, but England, France, Norway, and many other European countries built houses with adobe. I grew up there, and didn’t know!

My ignorance was so profound that I asked Quentin whether he makes the adobe bricks which he needs when he builds a house? But he was patient with me and explained how it works.

“I made a few of the adobes for this house. Four of the rooms were already there, and then we added a utility room at the back and a bedroom over here. I had a tractor, and I pulled a trailer with a big steel drum on it, and my son and I would fill it with dirt and water, and mix it up. And then either that evening or the next day, while he would drive the tractor forward, I'd open a little gate on the back, and it would spill out the mud and fill the forms that I had. I could make 90 bricks at a time. We'd let them sit for most of the day, and then lift the forms off, and there were our bricks, and then they just had to sit there till they were ready to use. So that's what's nice about adobe: you can make your own building materials but it takes time and is hard work!”

Clearly, if one wanted to build houses, one would have to find somebody who made and sold adobe bricks. Sure enough, at the intersection of highway 554 and 84 Quentin saw a little sign that said ‘Adobes for Sale’. It was a father-and-son enterprise– Andy Trujillo was the son. They made adobe bricks, and could deliver 500 a day. That was exactly the number of bricks that Quentin and his two co-workers could use in a day to build a house.

“That house we built in 1978 was passive solar, and we got an award for it. We got the Presidential Residential Passive Solar award. The award was $6,000 just for the design, and you got a second award of another $6,000 if you built the house. Robert Nicolais from El Rito and Los Angeles was the designer.”

​Quentin continued: “At about this time, some people started producing adobe at a factory scale. There was one man, Dennis Duran, who was making adobes at what's now Ohkay Owingeh. We got the adobe bricks for several houses from him. A little later, Mel Medina in Alcalde started making adobes at a large scale, with a vast investment in equipment and land. When you put the adobes on the ground, they have to lie there for at least a week before they're ready to be picked up. You have to let them dry out. And he could produce 25,000 adobes a day.  He called his business the Adobe Factory.”

Next, we looked at some issues of Adobe Today, a magazine published by Joe Tibbetts. Quentin showed me the photograph of La Capilla De Todos Los Santos, the Chapel of All the Saints, in San Luis/Colorado. It looks Mexican or Peruvian and has many domes, built with adobe.

​“What's interesting here are the domes, where the big one comes down, there's a half dome here and a half dome there, and there are two more on the other side. Have you ever been to Istanbul?” Quentin asked.

Yes,  I have, but it’s a long time ago…

“It’s similar, the dome comes down, but then it lands on other domes which land on more domes. This dome is huge, but it makes the space inside even bigger by these cascading smaller domes, and it gives you a very big space inside. How did people ever figure this out? It was built 1400 years ago. Quite often we don't give enough credit to the cultures of other times. When they started the building, they had to be clear over here and clear over there, and how they ever got all these other little domes on it and then get up to the big final dome. They had to do all kinds of calculations on the sizes of those domes and the curvature, and then the big dome goes on top. That's pretty amazing.”

I remembered that I had heard that the way to build with mud actually came from the Middle East, and that the word adobe is actually an Arab word.

Quentin confirmed this. “It’s dub, or sometimes it's tub, and every country in north-Africa has a slightly different word for it. And when you get to the Arabs, it starts sounding close to adobe. And once you get into Spain, it finally becomes adobe.”

“The magazine came out for a good number of years,” Quentin went on. “It also talks about Hassan Fathy, who designed the mosque at Dar al-Islam.”

Then we looked at a photo of the Great Mosque of Djenné in Mali, the largest adobe brick building in the world.

“Let me show you on my computer where adobe's going now.” Quentin took me to another room. “Remember that I said that Mel Medina could lay down 25,000 adobe bricks a day on a sustained basis? One day my phone rang, and this young lady with a  British accent said ‘we need 150 million adobe bricks.’ I said, ‘That's unprecedented’, and she wanted to know either how they could buy them, or how they could make them, or how they could have them made. 150 million bricks. It would take Mel Medina, who had declared to be the world's largest adobe making facility, 180 years to produce enough.“

​“I had a feeling where this was coming from – it's Saudi Arabia, because they've got the money, and they've got the land, but they don’t have the water. Every adobe brick you make on the ground, in this simple way, takes about a gallon of water. So they're going to need 150 million gallons of water. So then the answer has come from India. They have come up with these machines that can put down in one day many times more than what Mel Medina does in a year, and I'm going to show this to you on the computer.”

We looked at a website of an Indian company, SnPC, which sells brick-making machines that can produce 24,000 to 25,000 adobe bricks AN HOUR! Click on the link and take a look, it’s truly mind-boggling. But be warned, the website is poorly designed.

The 150 million adobe bricks which somebody had asked Quentin about were indeed to be used in Saudi Arabia, for a huge tourism project in Diriyah.  “The original capital was bombed by the Turks in World War One. Now they're going to rebuild the city, and it will offer luxury residences and hotels,  Diriyah Gate.”

​The companies involved in this huge project invited Quentin twice, as a consultant and expert in adobe building. That was about ten years ago. He had a funny story about his visit: “There was a pile of dirt, and all of these people in their suits were standing around and wondering what to do. I got down on my knees and put it together to see if it would hold together, and  I said, ‘Look, it'll make a brick.’ And everybody remembered that I was the guy that got down on his knees while everybody else was just standing there, looking around.”

That’s so impressive; Quentin’s masterfulness in everything related to adobe building was in demand all over the world. I appreciate all that I’ve learned in the company of Quentin and Maria. Thank you for a delightful afternoon.

​The Dome at Los Silvestres. Video produced by Lori Faye Bock.

Courtesy of The Los Alamos Reporter

NMSP NEWS RELEASE
​
On April 20, 2025, the New Mexico State Police Investigations Bureau was requested to investigate the off-duty death of Rio Arriba County Sheriff Billy Merrifield at 4759A NM Highway 96 in Abiquiu, NM.

Investigations Bureau agents learned through interviews that on April 20, 2025, at approximately 3:00 a.m., a friend of Sheriff Merrifield received a phone call from a woman who stated she was with Sheriff Merrifield, and they were involved in a minor crash in his government issued patrol vehicle while he was off-duty.

According to the friend, he located Sheriff Merrifield’s patrol unit approximately half a mile from his residence. When the friend spoke to him, Sheriff Merrifield stated he was OK. The patrol vehicle and Sheriff Merrifield were taken back to his residence. After they arrived at the residence, Sheriff Merrifield’s friend and the woman left the residence, leaving Sheriff Merrifield in his patrol vehicle.

The friend told investigators that later that morning, around 10:00 a.m., after several unsuccessful phone call attempts, he went to Sheriff Merrifield’s house to check on him. When he arrived, he found Sheriff Merrifield unresponsive in his patrol unit. He called 911 and began CPR until paramedics arrived on scene and took over lifesaving efforts, which were unsuccessful. Sheriff Merrifield was pronounced deceased at the scene by the Office of the Medical Investigator.

The Investigations Bureau continues to work to corroborate all the information received from the witnesses in this investigation. An autopsy was performed on Monday, April 21, 2025. The cause of death remains under investigation and autopsy results are pending. The possibility of the Sheriff being under the influence of an intoxicating liquor or drug is being investigated.

This incident remains under investigation by the New Mexico State Police Investigations Bureau.

Courtesy of New Mexico In Depth
​The Midweek by Trip Jennings
​
Two new cases of measles were diagnosed in southern New Mexico this week, pushing New Mexico’s total caseload to 65, according to the Associated Press.

Lea County is the hardest hit in the state’s outbreak, with Chaves and Doña Ana counties reporting one case each, the news service reported. 

From a geographical standpoint, it makes sense Lea County is the epicenter of New Mexico’s outbreak. It is on the Texas border and abuts Gaines County, the epicenter in Texas, the state with the most cases, 600, or nearly three-quarters of the 800 cases diagnosed across the nation. Seminole, a town in Gaines County, is only 30 minutes from Hobbs, New Mexico. I imagine a lot of folks from both counties mingle day-in, day-out as they shop or otherwise hang out, giving measles, an airborne disease that is spread when an infected person coughs, sneezes or talks, an opportunity to spread.

While measles is not always fatal, three people this year have succumbed to measles-related illnesses — two elementary school-aged children in Texas and an adult in New Mexico, all of whom were unvaccinated. 
Despite those deaths and active outbreaks of the illness in seven other states beyond Texas and New Mexico, a new poll from KFF, an independent source of health policy research, finds that half of American adults are unsure if certain false claims about measles are true or false.

The three claims are:
​
• the measles, mumps rubella vaccines have been proven to cause autism

• vitamin A can prevent measles infections.

• getting the measles vaccine is more dangerous than becoming infected with measles.

None of these claims are true. But there’s a lot of misinformation and disinformation floating around these days. 

Robert Kennedy, Jr., the U.S. Secretary for Health and Human Services, isn’t helping matters, with his long standing skepticism of vaccines. Before joining the Trump administration, he said the MMR vaccine that protects against measles is dangerous. 

Kennedy did say that the vaccine was the most effective way to prevent measles earlier this month, but that was met with anger from vaccine critics who saw it as a betrayal of Kennedy’s long standing views on vaccine safety, CNN reported. And he continued to sow confusion, saying the vaccine had not been sufficiently tested and only provided short-lived protection. Both claims are false. 

The KFF survey found that partisanship plays a major role in whether people know measles cases are spreading and whether they are worried about the most recent outbreak, the KFF survey found.

Here are a couple of findings:

Democrats are much more likely than Republicans to say they are worried about the outbreak of measles in the U.S. (76% v. 28%), and to know measles cases are up this year compared to recent years (71% v. 49%).Similar partisan gaps exist among parents as well, with Democratic and Democratic-leaning parents more than twice as likely as Republican and Republican-leaning parents to express worry over the outbreak of measles (73% v. 26%) and more likely to know the number of cases is currently higher than in past years (64% v. 37%).

Even amid widespread exposure to false claims about measles, large majorities of the public (83%) and parents (78%) say they are “very” or “somewhat confident” that the MMR vaccines are safe. However, confidence in the safety of MMR vaccines is lower among Republican and Republican-leaning parents, with about three in ten (31%) expressing a lack of confidence in the safety of MMR vaccines, including about one in six (17%) who say they are “not at all confident” the MMR vaccine is safe.

I’ve kept up with the measles outbreak this year but it felt close to me when I spent several days in Lubbock late last month due to a death in the family.

I wasn’t worried about contracting measles myself. My parents made sure my brother and I were vaccinated when we were children, as did my wife’s parents when she was little. Both of our children received the MMR vaccine before they entered public school and they’re in their 20s now. I probably would have worried about traveling to Lubbock if our children were newborns or toddlers.

If any one of us were to get sick, I told myself, we were protected by the decades-old vaccinations. 

It was that all the national news stories mentioned the outbreak happening near Lubbock, probably because it’s the largest city in that part of West Texas and most people don’t know where Gaines County is.

My stay in Texas pushed to the front of my mind the question of how so many Americans have become distrustful of public health measures meant to help protect children — and people in general.

It’s not a surprise or a shock after living through the COVID pandemic when many concerns were raised about the safety of that vaccine, or that there’s a partisan divide around the measles vaccine. COVID made clear we’re living in a different world than we lived in a few decades ago.
​
Distrust of experts — scientists, academics, physicians — and institutions is palpable these days. It’s enough to make one wonder how we’ll get past the disparate worlds we inhabit as Americans.

In advance of an expected executive order on Tuesday, New Mexico’s federal delegation, led by U.S. Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.), the top Democrat on the U.S. Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, sent a letter on April 21 to U.S. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum requesting the federal government leave the state’s monuments intact.

“National monuments are vitally important to our history and any proposals to reduce their boundaries will not  be reflective of the voices of New Mexicans,” the delegation wrote. “Each monument in New Mexico represents years of community  advocacy and support for the protection of the value they hold. In New Mexico, we have a $3.2 billion outdoor  recreation sector and monuments are a significant contributor to this robust economy.”

The letter particularly singles out Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks National Monument, Rio Grande del Norte, and Kasha-Katuwe Tent Rocks, which the letter says “are under consideration for  reduction or elimination.”

Organ Mountains in the southern part of the state hosts “significant petroglyph and archeological sites,” the letter notes, while Rio Grande del Norte “boasts some of  New Mexico’s most prized recreational opportunities in an area where the Rio Grande carves an 800-foot gorge through historic volcanic activity” and “provides access for traditional use like piñon nut collection.” Regarding Tent Rocks, the delegation notes that TIME included it on its list of the World’s Greatest Places of 2025. “Not only is Tent Rocks ‘geologically surreal,’ the letter says, “but it is  also a sacred landscape to the Cochiti Pueblo.”

​“There is no greater value to these natural landscapes than what is brought to the community through their continued protection,” the letter concludes. “Withdrawing protections from these sites would threaten the economic benefits associated with New Mexico’s outdoor recreation economy and it undermines our community and tribal voices.”

By Felicia Fredd
Xtreme Design SW

​“Think of a desert and you probably picture dry, dead dirt. If so, surprise! Much of the world’s most arid ground is alive with a tiny ecosystem, no more than a few inches thick. It’s so tiny, in fact—so thin and delicate, so apparently parched and lifeless—that this “secretly living” layer of soil is called a cryptobiotic crust.” https://www.newmexicology.com/the-blog/2016/1/26/dark-secrets-of-the-cryptobiotic-crust
​
As I’ve pursued research into effective design techniques for erosion control, I’ve been sidetracked by dozens of ‘desert transformation’ YouTube videos - most of which are associated with permaculture activities and display the terms ‘restoration’ or ‘restorative’ in their titles.

One in particular witnessed a 10-acre site that had been brutalized in the name of ‘restorative’ water harvesting. In this video, a YouTuber walked viewers along a path of destruction where he’d run a backhoe over sloped dryland soils, such as ours, in order to more easily carve an array of dams, berms, and zuni bowl pits. These earthworks were then reinforced using most of the hand-sized rocks scattered on the land surface, where they had been doing a fine job of protecting the soil, and slowing water runoff, but which gave the added benefit, he explained, of creating valuable divets in the soil surface.

Some of these types of projects are pretty interesting in one respect or another, but so much of the motivation seems driven by abstract ideas about environmental ‘improvement’ without any particular knowledge of said environment. One guy filming in a grassy field with his cows said of his neighbor’s contrasting sagebrush rangeland “It’s just sitting there; it’s not doing anything!” He obviously didn’t get the memo about all the special wildlife supported by large sagebrush communities; however, I’m glad he said what he did because the many ways people see and experience landscape is pretty fascinating business.

I just wanted to point out that tearing into fragile desert landscapes with romantic notions of ‘improving’ the local ecology can easily do more harm than good. Here, for example, we have something called cryptobiotic soil. It’s that bumpy textured soil crust we’ve all at least vaguely noticed, and what it does is hold things in place, help with the process of nitrogen and carbon fixation, and hold moisture. Being composed of microscopic sugar filaments, and tiny blue green algae, it is ridiculously fragile. It’s destruction will sometimes be unavoidable, but it is “… critical to maintaining the health of wide swaths of land across New Mexico.”

“Because these soils have higher nitrogen and water content than uncolonized soil, and because they are stabilized against erosion, they provide ideal conditions for desert plants to germinate and grow. Biological soils are the foundation for healthy desert plant communities.” https://www.nps.gov/glca/learn/nature/soils.htm

Quick! Before poetry disappears for the next eleven months!
​
By Zach Hively

April is National Poetry Month, and I am touched to be the one reintroducing this lost art form to the masses. This includes people like you and me! Because odds are, we don’t understand poetry.

Poetry has lain dormant since history days, murking up its modern-time meanings. What I can tell you with authority is that poetry used to be a noble calling, largely because humans had not yet invented doctors.

Once we could compare it to medical science, we got the notion that poetry was hard and did not earn actual money. Plus, with doctors on hand, people weren’t all dying by the age of twelve. With all that extra life-expectancy time to challenge our brains, build our vocabularies, and deepen our understanding of human nature, we as a species chose to browse pictures of puppies jumping into swimming pools after tennis balls instead of doing poems.

But poetry does not die easily.

There is no other way to explain why I was supposed to read both The Iliad AND “The Red Wheelbarrow” in high school. Tragically, modern- day-me was not around to teach high-school-me to better appreciate poetry’s efficiency and utility, literature’s answer to the Sports Illustrated sand bikini.

Though I was too late to save myself, I am now poised to help poetry pounce on a comeback. We live in an age of short media, such as gifs, 140-character journalism, and Seth Green. Why not turn to poetry?

Probably because so much poetry these days is, objectively speaking, bad.

That’s what happens when a society tries to prioritize science, mathematics, and human rights violations over true art. Yet the quality of poetry does not negate its publishability! Plenty of presses print volumes of carefully chosen poetry submissions for the super low price of FREE.*

*With purchase of five or more copies at the one-time wholesale price of $45.00 each.

Still, quality work is often buried among such wastelands of drivel.For instance, in the fifth grade, I composed a rousing epic about the RMS Titanic--way trendier than the lame movie, although unfortunately with less nude portraiture. My poem was chosen for publication by one such press because I was clearly a Wunderkind. My parents were so proud, they snipped $45.00 out of the grocery budget to buy my book.

I pity the other, self-appointed “poets”—all those poor saps suckered into filling out my volume of poetry by purchasing copies for their distant relatives, secretaries, garbage collectors, and spouses. But don’t let the publishing houses deter your pursuit of poetry; they will do anything just for money. The true poets out there are in the poetry biz for all the right reasons.

The right reasons are simple, given a few qualifiers. Writing a short, meaningful, artistic poem is something all deep and attractive people do in order to become both embarrassingly wealthy and immortal. Plus, it’s easy. Want proof? Here is my own edgy and spontaneous composition:

Roses aren’t red.
The sky isn’t blue.
The distinctions between colors are a subjective phenomenon adhering to social regulations and contextual indicators; colors, in other words, are not definite, and our perception of them relies on linguistics, cultural norms, and possibly our own personal color wheels.
This poem is so edgy, it doesn’t even rhyme.

Eat your heart out, T. S. Eliot.

And speaking of crowd-pleasers who craft non-controversial hits on the fly, even you can be goaded into creating poetry, so long as you too are deep and attractive. Absolutely any poet can trick graduate students into mistaking their poetry as “metaphoric” or “possessing meaning” by using only the advice-column section of the newspaper, or a page anonymously donated from your sister’s diary.

Here’s how.

Go through the piece of writing you chose, circling your favorite words, either for sound, definition, the shape of the letters, or all of the above. Snip those words out, like pieces of a ransom note. Then circle any other words you need in order to link those words together, and bam! you have a poem.

Below is an exemplary example of the “found poetry” technique, using words from this selfsame chapter to hone a Meisterwerk of a poem that is, at best, equal to the sum of its parts:

Noble sand bikini
Poised to prioritize quality.
Super low, a rousing,
Snipped, deep and attractive
Crowd-pleasers
That rhyme with rubes.

This technique, unlike other so-called “arts” that require chunks of marble or alpaca-hair brushes or training, is actually feasible. Seriously, even a pet parakeet can make this kind of poetry in the bottom of its cage. And who can judge the quality of little Polly Fluffmugget’s creative genius?
​
I can. And I’ll consider it for publication, if you enclose just $45.00.

A chance for a divine encounter—whether in the form of religion, art, nature, or green chile stew—is around every corner in Abiquiu’s Piedra Lumbre Basin.

​Originally published in New Mexico Magazine, March 2023, copyright © New Mexico Magazine. To subscribe, visit newmexicomagazine.org/subscribe

By Molly Boyle
Photos by Tira Howard

IT’S NEARLY 4 A.M. in the Chama River Canyon, which means it’s time for the morning vigils at the Monastery of Christ in the Desert, near Abiquiu. I launch myself out of my cozy guest chamber, bundle up, and shuffle down a moonlit dirt road toward a stately adobe chapel. The night is silent, though a vibrational current of stars is busy above. I stop for a second, taking in the layered stillness of the coral-and-cream-streaked cliffs flanking me on both sides. My eyes blur at the beauty.

​I’m in an Abiquiu state of mind, I think later, peacefully leaving the Benedictine retreat where I’ve read, hiked, chanted psalms led by monks in the Gregorian tradition, and otherwise spoken to no one for two days. I point my truck down bumpy Forest Road 151 and drive along the river, listening to a radio station that’s somehow thematically playing a dharma talk from Santa  Fe’s Upaya Zen Center. (It’s Sunday, after all.)

I pass hikers on the Continental Divide Trail and head into the expansive Piedra Lumbre Basin, part of a 1766 land grant where the landscape and the shimmering waters of Abiquiu Lake are centered by the southern presence of Cerro Pedernal, known as Tsee p’in in Tewa. Both names mean “flint mountain” or “flaking stone mountain.”

Read more: Bring a bit of New Mexico into your abode—no matter where you live—with hues inspired by her works.

Georgia O’Keeffe, the valley’s most famous transplant, was obsessed with it, painting Pedernal at least 28 times from her perch at Ghost Ranch. The mesa’s flat head, rising to an elevation of 9,862 feet, resembles a long knife when viewed from the north or south. It has been a landmark and spiritual touchstone for people over the past thousand years.

​“Abiquiu is a cosmic village,” says santero, author, archaeologist, and resident Charles M. Carrillo in Lesley Poling-Kempes’s 1997 book Valley of Shining Stone. The 1829 starting point of the Old Spanish Trail to California, it’s a place of pilgrims and passersby. A deep, complex past surrounds Abiquiu’s present, from the skeletons of the first Triassic dinosaurs, discovered at Ghost Ranch in 1947; to the Ancestral Puebloans who set Poshuouinge on a high mesa above the Río Chama around 1400; to the 18th-century Spanish colonists who built the village of Santa Rosa de Lima, of which only earthen walls remain. The Piedra Lumbre’s capacity for spiritual pockets of experience is found at the 59-year-old monastery, located 29 miles northwest of the Abiquiu post office, and at Ghost Ranch, where generations of bold-face names and regular people have sought solace and inspiration.

More devotional stops are farther south. Just off the Abiquiu Plaza, O’Keeffe’s home and studio remain nearly as the artist left them in 1986, a study in one woman’s monastic commitment to capturing the landscape. Nearby, in two separate moradas, members of the Penitente Brotherhood pray with the exact same alabados their ancestors brought from Durango, Mexico, 300 years ago. Just across the river, the Dar al Islam Mosque and educational center occupies the same grounds as Plaza Blanca, the White Place, a stunning natural cathedral of the gigantic light-gray rocks that make up the Abiquiu Formation. The setting regularly and literally snatches the breath of hikers.

​“If you visit the monastery, Ghost Ranch, and the White Place, then you know there is something that seekers feel here,” says Poling-Kempes. The author of Ghost Ranch and Ladies of the Canyons has lived in Abiquiu for nearly 50 years, but she still feels the same awe at the landscape as she did in the 1970s, when she was a college student working at Ghost Ranch. “It’s a pristine place, for the most part, and people long for that.”

ARTHUR NEWTON PACK (1893–1975), ONE OF THE first Anglo Ghost Ranch owners, writes in his memoir about meeting in the 1930s with an elderly Hispanic woman who was born in the ranch’s Ghost House. She told tales of the witches and spirits that gave the place its original name, Rancho de los Brujos—or las Brujas, depending on whom you ask. A winged cow soared down the cliffs at dusk, the woman said, and anyone who saw it would die. She said her father had been one of the infamous Archuleta brothers, cattle rustlers who hid a cache of gold somewhere on the property. Her uncle killed her father in a dispute over the money, holding the women hostage until they found the chance to sneak away. A posse hung the uncle and his compadres from a massive cottonwood tree that still stands on the ranch.

An air of mystery still hangs over the landscape when I visit the ranch, on a sunny day in mid-December, to take the O’Keeffe Landscape Trail Ride. It’s a mellow horseback journey through the painter’s inspirational spots, including Pedernal, a dead cedar that O’Keeffe called Gerald’s Tree in a 1937 painting, and the vibrant rock faces portrayed in her 1940 painting Red and Yellow Cliffs, which serve as the ranch’s backdrop.

​Read more: Of all the ways to explore our sprawling natural lands, one of the best is astride a sure-footed steed who can take you to places that simply can’t be seen from a car or on a hike.

Other features of the property include a ramshackle, 1800s-looking cabin that was built for the 1991 film City Slickers, and an iconic Western horizon you might recognize from The Ballad of Buster Scruggs or Silverado. The ranch’s Ruth Hall Museum of Paleontology and Florence Hawley Ellis Museum of Anthropology provide a good grounding of the people and prehistoric creatures who once roamed the Chama River Valley; the library is a haven for the families and individuals who retreat to Ghost Ranch for rest, relaxation, or creative workshops.

When I ask Tolga, the wrangler who accompanies me on the trail ride, where he lived before Abiquiu, he cracks a smile. “I’m from where all cowboys come from,” he replies. “New York City.”

​Abiquiu attracts all kinds, Zach Hively affirms to me over coffee at Bode’s General Store. At the 130-year-old mercantile, gas station, gift shop, and camping supplier—which serves as a way station and reliable breakfast burrito pit stop for travelers, hikers, fly-fishers, river rats, and locals—Hively tells me his origin story as a resident and business owner. In 2019, the Albuquerque-raised writer moved to the area and started Casa Urraca Press, which publishes New Mexico poets Margaret Randall, V.B. Price, and Anna C. Martinez. The openness of the landscape, he felt, gave him artistic license to start a creative business there, even though he knew not a soul when he arrived. “You can make really close personal connections here,” he says, despite the relative isolation of the 150 Abiquiu residents counted on the 2020 census. “I still have people who come up to me and remember the first public reading I did here. Everyone remembers one another.”

The  social event of the year happens in October, with the Abiquiu Studio Tour. For three days, artists throughout the basin open their studios, so visitors can stop by on self-guided driving tours. Last fall, I mounted the steps to the house and studio of Charles Carrillo and his wife, Debbie, a micaceous potter who received a lifetime achievement award from the Santa Fe Spanish Market in 2014.

“It was Debbie’s family’s ancestral home,” Carrillo says of the seemingly ancient building on a hill near the south side of the Abiquiu Plaza. “Her grandmother built that house starting in the late thirties, on top of a ruin of another room block that had been built in the 1760s.”

Read more: Five of Abiquiú’s under-the-radar artists open their off-the-beaten-path doors.

​Locals refer to the part of the plaza where the house is situated as Moqui, a Spanish word for Hopi people. Carrillo uses that detail to weave a colorful tapestry of the diverse Genízaro people who made a lasting settlement in Abiquiu starting in the mid-1700s. The Genízaros, who originated as Indigenous captives and slaves of Spanish colonists, counted ancestors among the Hopi, Tewa, and Great Plains tribes. They built a stronghold of their multicultural heritage in Abiquiu, using land grants awarded by the Spanish crown in exchange for their defense against Apache, Comanche, and Navajo raids.

The complexity of the land’s history is dizzying, and it invites you to stay more than a day to absorb it all. Curious visitors can contemplate in secular fashion from a courtyard room at the Abiquiu Inn, or at one of the Grand Hacienda’s luxe suites overlooking Abiquiu Lake. I’ve had metaphysical experiences during fireside suppers in campgrounds that line the Río Chama along Forest Road 151, and while winding through the wooden Stations of the Cross on an alternate path toward the Monastery of Christ in the Desert.

The monastery’s guestmaster monk, Brother Chrysostom Christie-Searles, tells me he’s made two attempts now to climb Cerro Pedernal. “One was thwarted because of rain,” he says. “I got close. The second one was thwarted because of misinformation, not knowing how to get to the very top. So, on a third try, I should be able to mount it.

His mission to summit the landmark strikes me as holier than O’Keeffe’s, who called Pedernal her “private mountain.” “God told me if I painted it enough, I could have it,” the artist once claimed.

I prefer to view Brother Chrysostom’s quest through the centuries-old lens of St. Theodore, who I read during my stay at the monastery. “The monk is one whose gaze is fixed on God,” he wrote. These words, for me, break Abiquiu’s divine landscape wide open to understanding.

​Read more: Riana Campground’s proximity to fantastic hiking, fishing, and much more makes it a dream base for no-frills RVers.

OUT AND ABOUT IN ABIQUIU

Commune with nature.

​Hike the half-mile National Forest Service trail at Poshuouinge to view the remnants of an Ancestral Pueblo settlement, nearly three miles south of Abiquiu on US 84. Stop into the office at Ghost Ranch for a trail map to Box Canyon, Chimney Rock, or Kitchen Mesa, hikes of varying difficulty and length that afford heavenly vistas. Check out nearby slices of the Continental Divide Trail, which features views from the mesas overlooking Ghost Ranch. Contact Dar al Islam to register and receive the gate code, which allows access to Plaza Blanca (the White Place). Respectful hikers can get the lay of the land on a moderate one-mile trek.

Commune with art.

Reserve a tour of the Georgia O’Keeffe Home and Studio, which begins with a stop at the Georgia O’Keeffe Welcome Center. The center features rotating, beautifully curated free exhibits about the artist’s art and life in Abiquiu. Starting April 11, catch Around the World with O’Keeffe, about the impact of international travels on her personal style and home design. On the second weekend in October, grab a map for the Abiquiu Studio Tour, which includes nearly 30 open artists’ studios.

Find God, or a little peace.

Contemplate the church ruins and calvary cross at Santa Rosa de Lima, the area’s original Spanish settlement off US 84. Celebrate the saint’s feast day, August 23, with an on-site Mass and procession to the village of Abiquiu. Reserve a two-night minimum stay at Monastery of Christ in the Desert, where guests can participate in scheduled prayers and services in the Abbey Church, and dine—silently!—on meals prepared by the monks. (Their new greenhouse should be complete this spring.) Stop into a service at Santo Tomásmission church on the Abiquiu Plaza during Holy Week in April, where Charles Carrillo (hermano mayor of the local Penitentes) says he’ll grant visitors a tour of a local morada. The Abiquiu Inn, Las Parras de Abiquiu, the Grand Hacienda, and several Airbnbs in the area offer more secular lodgings. Get in touch with Dar al Islam to learn about educational workshops, retreats, and other Islam-focused programs. Peruse the daily activities and weekly calendar at Ghost Ranch to design a retreat that fits your mindset.

Eat local.

Bode’s green chile cheeseburgers and other prepared foods enjoy well-deserved hype from hungry travelers, campers, boaters, and hikers. Don’t miss the green chile stew, daily specials, and Sunday brunches at Café Sierra Negra, a popular performance and gathering spot for local artists. Find a larger menu of comfort food and upscale entrees at Café Abiquiu, at the Abiquiu Inn. Mask up to order from the patio window at Mamacita’s Pizzeria and you’ll be rewarded with a New York–style pizza made with love by no-nonsense owner Marta Uribe, who also takes good care of the local cats that haunt the place. Get a white pie with garlic and green chile to go, then take it over for a beer and some pool at Los Caminos Bar, next to Mamacita’s.

Buy a memento.

Shops at Bode’s, Abiquiu Inn, and the O’Keeffe Welcome Center offer locally made soaps, lotions, art, crafts, and books about Abiquiu and its residents. Check for pop-up art shows at the inn. Bosshard Gallery and Historic Mercantile sells a selection of international art and artifacts. Nest maintains a cool collection of gifts, books, art, and jewelry in an off-the-beaten-path setting. Visit Purple Adobe Lavender Farm for an herbal fix, whether from lavender iced tea, bath salts, or healing salves.