Bright

The New Mexico sun shines—bright. It scorches everything; its intensity is unforgiving. Moving here from the Pacific Northwest was a startling experience. Instead of vast grey cloud cover there is endless blue sky. Instead of perpetual rain showers and leafy, moist, mossy forests there is a sun so strong that every road, riverbed, field, and hillside, and every object that inhabits them, is baked, cracked, and bone dry. What manages to survive here lives a parched and desolate life.

 

People say this place ‘strips you down.’ The severity of the surrounding terrain seems to call forth a psychic bleakness and isolation in one’s inner landscape mirroring its outer counterpart. But over time you begin to see in the stark bright light a raw and honest beauty like no other.