Enchanted...

Friends, let me just tell you how much I love my state...
Today I was driving home (to Albuquerque) from a cabin in Cloudcroft (a little mountain town near Ruidoso)(note, please if you're a Texan, the O on the end of Ruidoso, not an A, it's an O) and, as I drove down the mountain, I was treated to view of White Sands meeting black lava with blue and purple peaks of more mountains in the background. White Sands looks like an ocean of white (the dunes look like waves from far away) and it just kind of fades back into desert out toward the north (i think...) until the desert suddenly appears black. The black is from Malpais, a big lava flow. Always, always in the background are more mountains.
I stopped at Malpais and hiked around for a little while because I'd been raging within at the situation I've again found myself in (more later on that) and I needed some air. I was reminded how much I love, love, LOVE to be outside as I wandered down a path through the lava. Malpais is like another world...black lava that has bubbled and cracked and wrinkled and completely covered everything. There are some plants growing out of the crevices and they are almost startlingly green next to the black. In a place like Malpais, it feels like there is room for my soul to expand to the depth and width that it is supposed to be... it feels like the cold air and the blue sky and the mountains in the distance are all working to clean me out, all those crannies within that get so crammed full and twisted up with junk thoughts in every day life.
I know that New Mexico is ridiculed with every breath by nearly everyone I know in TX...but you're all wrong, it's not ugly or barren, it is beautiful. The openness and the desert is lonely and really does enchant you after awhile...the colors that vary from yellow to brown to red to pink to purple to blue to white beckon somehow...the mountains and their sweet cold air and pine trees and aspens speak peace...the sound of the wind through the cottonwood tree leaves tempts the soul to dream of flying, soaring. This is a place where I can think and where dreams feel unlimited and where it seems God himself reaches down to paint my sky and the land around every sunrise and sunset. Beautiful.