“Light is everything.” Don’t tell that to someone on the brink of spiritual bankruptcy. It wouldn’t be kind.
I’m going to be honest and say I was having a tough time at the beginning of 2025. The magazine I had given my soul to for 19 years was closing up, I had been prepared to captain that ship into a new era, and for the first time since I was 15 I didn’t have a job. So I did what most people would do in need of a spiritual awakening: I drove 15 hours to Taos, New Mexico. I think this is what artists for over a century have been doing, heading to the high desert of Northern New Mexico to see what I can only describe as the greatest, most expansive skies I have ever seen and a landscape that was both alien and incredibly fucking honest and real. It made sense that this was the land of Agnes Martin and Larry Bell, that Ansel Adams and Georgia O’Keeffe had been influenced by this landscape.
I’m going to admit I just really wanted to eat, swim, and stare at stars and not think about art at all. I think I was at my almost absolute limit. I had seen so much of my career become overtaken by the talking-head social media lecturing circuit of “what is wrong with the art world” that I just thought I was going to quit. I wasn’t going to quit and move to Taos per se, because I have heard that it’s the city that traps you, that it’s hard to get out of even when you want to. I was more so going to see the sky and think of something else to do. Someone else to be. I think since the pandemic, and even before then, I had spent 19 straight years working and I didn’t really take much time off, I wasn’t afforded it, and I thought a week in New Mexico would do me good. It was D.H. Lawrence who wrote The Woman Who Rode Away in New Mexico in 1924, and though last time I checked I wasn’t a woman, I was thinking a bit of what riding away could do for me. (There was a line in Rode Away that reads, “Why don’t we stay in love that way all our lives? Why do we turn into corpses with consciousness?”, and I’m going to be honest, although that hits pretty hard for someone looking for a life change at 43, and I probably wouldn’t dare tell anyone after I lost my job that I was reading lines like this out loud, this wasn’t what I was completely going for, but let’s digress on how incredible that line is another time.)
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