Decisions Decisions Decisions!

working with.....

Working With Santa Fe

Friends ask me
if I’ve decided.

As though a life
were a light switch.

Yes.

No.

Buy the house.

Don’t buy the house.

But this is not
how mountains speak.

This is not
how the cottonwoods decide
to loosen their leaves.

This is not
how a river finds its way home.

I have been sitting
with Santa Fe,

the way I sit
with someone I love
who is not yet ready
to tell me the truth.

Every morning
the light arrives
without making a case
for itself.

The mountains say nothing.

The ravens offer no advice.

The aspens do not ask for a mortgage.

And still…

something
is happening.

Anxiety,
of course,
has packed three suitcases.

What if you regret it?

What if you don’t?

What if this is too much?

What if you miss Woodstock?

Your family? Will they visit?

What if this is
the last great adventure?

Poor dear.

She has mistaken
decision making for prediction.

But I am beginning to think
a good decision is less like
solving a puzzle

and more like
learning the name of a place
slowly enough

that it begins calling yours.

So I walk.

I paint.

I write.

I listen.

I let the desert introduce itself.

I let the wind tell me stories
it has been saving for someone
old enough to hear them.

Perhaps
the question
is not,

“Should I buy
a place here?”

Perhaps the question is,

“What am I willing
to belong to?”

Because every belonging
asks something of us.

The land.

A marriage.

A child.

A community.

A poem.

None of them
promise certainty.

All of them ask for devotion.

So I am working
with this decision,

the way one works
with clay,

or grief,

or an old friend
who has come
to stay awhile.

Not forcing.

Not resisting.

Turning it gently
in my hands

until one day

it no longer feels

like I have chosen
Santa Fe,

but that together,

through color
and silence,
through the astonishment
of another sunrise,

we have chosen

one another.

Love,

Jayne