Land of Enchantment
Is there such a thing as a spiritual landscape? It seems wrong somehow to suppose that God manifests Himself more fully in one place than another. The whole earth is His creation, after all. Why should one place feel more sacred, more suffused with spiritual energy than another? And yet, there is something that you can feel here in New Mexico as soon as the airplane lands. Is it the quality of the light? The low relative humidity of the air? The vision of mountains in the distance, encircling the land like the arms of a god? My parents and I moved to Albuquerque when I was only a few months old. My sister and brother were both born here and we lived in Albuquerque until I was five, returning for a year when I was seven. I spent third grade* at the foot of Sandia Mountain looking for castles along its top ridge. Even today, so many decades later, I can't look at a landscape without mountains and not feel that it is missing something essential. Coming back to New Mexico ...