Las Cruces

"Wherever I've lived I've felt at home." - Blake

It seems like more than five days have passed since I moved into J-House. J-House-- with the wind shook pecan tree leaving dappled shadows on the backyard, with the sun too brilliant over the Organ mountains to open my eastward shade, with our five spots at the table already ritualized and our stories and questions unwinding and weaving together. The quickness of adapting to new spaces always surprises me. 

On  Sunday we met and joined our fellow residents of Las Cruces for the first time at a solidarity vigil ("sometimes there is only one side".) Tuesday we built a keyhole garden in our yard with the help of the El Paso house and our neighbor guide, Blake. We met with a pastor and then a Buddhist priest who guided us in zen practice-- the sacredness of the ordinary, the ordinariness of the sacred. It has felt easy to fall into step with my housemates-- dinners shared with neighbors, mapping out our spiritual journeys, turning the corner of the bookstore shelf to see them all in a line, each caught up in a book, star-gazing in the neighborhood playground, car rides through El Paso and Las Cruces, stopping at a bakery in Segundo Barrio, being together in quiet, reflecting on spirituality, community, self-care, humility, and our many identities. It is always the smallest moments and turns of phrase that make me fall in love with the particularities of (near) strangers. 

Today we visited a family in a colonia of El Paso who made us tamales and shared their story of the border with us-- in sparks of joy and humor and grief and courage. We met with Pastor Rosemary who taught us about the economic realities of Juarez, El Paso and the colonias. Yesterday, Blake stayed for dinner, brought us a bounty of vegetables from his garden, and shared his local knowledge of the Las Cruces community, of the environmental and water concerns/history in the region, of all the best deals to live simply.  I feel blessed and rooted by the generosity of the people we have met-- generosity that is physical, relational, supportive, and spiritual. 

The warm summer nights make me nostalgic for Salinas, for these periods that displace me and give me space to re-arrange who I am as I re-examine and process myself in a new context.

There is so much to come this year, but it has been an auspicious beginning.

* * *
I.
This warm heat falling over the arms, the face, the neck

like close memories or tailgates nearing the horizon
all the lives, all the choices you have been creating this sharp instant:
now
and now
       and now
              then fading into the gentle dark

a mother's hope is always in the present
food for the belly, safety in the dim corners,
for the world to preserve the gentleness of her sleeping babe

     What is God's dream of the world?

What do the gods' store to sew into the next season?
the seeds the ancestors save are evidence of the thing hoped for:
children's futures, continuity.
   
The zen priest draws a circle with one motion
and I think of red thread, your tattooed shoulder
how I know even as I kissed you that I would
leave
         the wood floor, a bird's cry and shadow across
the polished gleam
                           galaxies, spirals, the unhealed aches
now
and now
      and now

     I count my breaths
     I let the past dissipate in a curled ring of smoke
     I drift in the present

Somewhere in our molecules we carry each other
or have exhaled each other
and the future becomes

now 

and now
       and now

and we become the homes we make for ourselves in
these borrowed bodies, molecules traded and traded, changed:

now
and now
       and now