For My Own Good

On the advice of my doctor, who just happens to be a naturopath (although I chose him for that very reason three years ago), I’m back on my eating program. I won’t call it a diet because it’s really about forming new habits. It’s not rocket science. I can read about it or hear about it just about anywhere I turn.

Alcohol. That’s the heavy in this story. You don’t read too many stories in the news about people over the limit on chocolate meringue pie causing pain and suffering on the highway. I learned a long time ago about booze and the highway, and even then I still let so-called good times with friends, and just people, put me in harm’s way. My choice, my bad, my past. We mostly stay at home to medicate ourselves these days. My doctor says that I let my friends influence me to drink more than I should, more than I can really—too much, too often. Not so good, I know. But my doctor is wrong. I can’t blame anyone else for my habits—any of them.

Last night, after 10 days of eating consciously and foregoing that gin and tonic or two or glass of Malbec or two at the magic hour sometime around the evening news or with friends, I found myself staring square into the face of two open bottles of wine on the table at dinner. I had traveled an hour up the interstate at the invitation of a friend there to attend the opera, and part of the evening included dinner and speaker on the grounds of the Santa Fe Opera. The food was beautiful, satisfying but light, I chose the strawberries and a slice of Brie for dessert, and I allowed myself a glass of white wine. That’s the story, no big deal. It was a big deal, though. I had gone 10 days without alcohol, motivated to shed a few pounds, eager to look in the mirror and see a difference in my face and my mid section, to pull up a pair of pants and smile because there’s extra room in the waist. Having that glass of wine was a big deal for a lot of reasons.

Everything in moderation, including moderation, they say. I realized long ago that moderation—well, not so easy for me. I know a few people who by any comparison struggle with alcohol. Someone who calls himself a recovering alcoholic with more than 30 years to his credit commented to a mutual friend and me awhile back that he could never have just a couple of glasses of wine or mixed drinks, like our friend and me. For him, that would always lead to several beers and end up with him drunk, he added. I’ve been there and lived to tell about—no small miracle. Trust me, instead an incredible bounty of miracles, I know to my very core.

Cigarettes played a minor role in my adult life off and on for 30-odd years. I grew up with a daddy who smoked all of his life, stopping at 65 only because of the onset of emphysema. He died a few months shy of his 70th birthday. I have put them down twice, and during the time that I was using, I was an on-again off-again smoker—not my daddy’s cigarette smoker.

On a beach in Cozumel in 1983, sipping an ice-cold Modelo with David, my partner at the time, and a friend with whom we were vacationing, I asked David for a Merit, our cigarette of choice at the time. After taking two or three hits, I looked out at the water and said to myself, I want to live. I put out the cigarette and didn’t smoke for 10 years. It was as simple as that. My next round of smoking lasted for five years—introduced to rolling your own by a couple of guys that I spent time with during those five years. They also liked to drink, especially the one who clearly struggled with alcohol. He was an aggressive, angry drunk. He told me in a phone call four years ago that at the time he had a few years of recovery under his belt. I’ve known others. Yes, there’s a story there as well. February 19, 1998, on a trip to visit a friend in Austin, Texas, I put down the smokes for a second, and no doubt, final time.

Food has never been my demon, even though I enjoyed a few too many Fritos and a few too many slices of coconut crème pie over the five years my oldest sister, with some help from me, looked after our mother. I know with certainty, though, that food sometimes is not, and alcohol clearly never has been, a good friend to me. The record shows that we consume to forget—be it food or booze, or whatever other world-based device we choose, or any combination of the above. Let me not beat up on myself, yet again, however. For now, since right now is all I have, I’ll just say that on the advice of my doctor, I’m focused on making better choices for myself, hoping to grab a healthy habit.

This writer always has something going on—keeping himself stirred up a little, sometimes a lot. That’s what those who know him might say—not that they would say anything, not that it really matters so much anymore what anyone has to say about his choices. I remind myself that choice making is my birthright, but it took a long, long time—decades—for me to realize that—about choices, about choosing, and about living with consequences. That journey continues. Best affirmations are welcomed. And so it is.

For My Own Good—Albuquerque, New Mexico (July 10, 2011)

R. Harold Hollis

A Good Day

Like I’ve said, no birder am I. Nonetheless, each Tuesday morning I am at my volunteer post at the Randall Davey Audubon Center in Santa Fe. For two years, I have genuinely liked being here at the top of Upper Canyon Road, where the sights and sounds never cease to please, and the visitors are endlessly interesting. All one needs to bring to this experience is an appreciation of nature and an honest liking of other folks. I meet both of those requirements, in spite of being a bit of a curmudgeon from time to time. More than likely, on any given day at this wildlife sanctuary, you have the opportunity of reaching out to other like-minded people.

I don’t know what it is about today. I realize that virtually every hiking trail in Santa Fe is closed—including the Bear Canyon trail here in our center, the adjoining Nature Conservancy, the trails along the ski basin road, and the list goes on. A much longer list tells the story for Albuquerque. And the story must be the same wherever you go in the land of enchantment, where we have set a record for extreme drought conditions. The gardens here in the center—that typically this time of year would be double or triple fullness and laden with blooms—show evidence of the severe lack of moisture. The blooms are scant, even though a blanket of yellow makes a statement here and there in the garden.

The birds on this day don’t seem to know, however, that we are on hard times. Or maybe that’s what they’re talking about. They are loud, almost unruly. And as I watch the feeders outside of the visitor center, a smile breaks across my face. “Is that a Bullocks’s Oriole,” a visitor asks. “Yes, it is,” I confirm, confident in having learned its identity a couple of weeks ago, thanks to a colorful display in the visitor center and to the white board outside where visitors can list their sightings. Another question about our hummers, and I’m pulling up the Cornell website on my computer so we can confirm the identity of these little guys hungrily going at the feeder attached to one of the windows.

We’re here. Happy, loud voices of young children here for summer camp are carried on the breeze. Locals just looking for an outside respite somewhere—here, as it turns out. Along with the locals today, visitors came from New York, California, Texas. “We’re from Dallas. If you think it’s hot here, it’s 103 in Dallas, 110 with the heat index," related a woman who had surprised her mother with a visit to Santa Fe, especially to visit 10,000 Waves, a Japanese-style spa in the mountains on the way to the ski basin. Not everyone comes through the visitor center, so likely other places outside New Mexico were represented today.

We’re all trying to catch a break. And as the wildfires continue to rage northwest of the city—in spite of the containment that has once again spared Los Alamos—in this place, on this day, we are reminded that joy and delight are still very much alive. A good day it is, yes indeed. And so it is.

A Good Day—Santa Fe, New Mexico (July 5, 2011)

R. Harold Hollis

Denver Botanic Gardens, May 2011

We Are Responsible for the Clouds, Reprise

(image of Los Conchas Fire, by Sheron Smith-Savage, Santa Fe, New Mexico, 2011)

“Nearly 13,000 acres of land in the Santa Clara Canyon was blackened by the Las Conchas fire by Friday evening.

That land accounts for nearly a quarter of the Santa Clara Reservation—land considered sacred.

Pueblo Governor Walter Dasheno said Friday, "Yes, it is our home, but it's also our church and it's also our traditional lands."

Thirteen-year-old Mirdacia Padilla lives on the pueblo. She says they won't be able to do traditional dances without the deer and elk that live in that canyon.

‘I'm happy I got to at least see the canyon before it all burned, but I'm sad because my brother, and all these younger kids won't be able to see the canyon or remember what it looked like,’ Padilla said.

Governor Dasheno says the canyon has been scorched by flames before, and there's always hope.

‘We can re-plant the trees, the plants will grow back up, the water will be cleaned out, the fish will come back and the birds will fly,’ Dasheno said."

(from KOB.com, NBC Albuquerque, New Mexico, report for July 1, 2011)

As we approach the 235th anniversary of the official beginning of the independence of our homeland, who in America can be unaware of the events that have unfolded in northern New Mexico over the last week. This year alone in the U. S., we have seen more disaster than we want to see. Some of us witness it from afar, while others find themselves—wondering wounded, conflicted, mournful and sad, amazingly hopeful—in the midst of the wildfire, the raging and flooding river, and the breathtaking tornado. In northern New Mexico, fire has once again come to Los Alamos County, and well over 100,000 acres of land has been scorched—so far. Again, the Los Alamos National Laboratory, one of the largest science and technology institutions in the world, has been spared. And today, the nearby-Santa Clara Pueblo has been changed forever and for a long, long time by this wildfire—the largest in New Mexico history.

Yesterday I carried my friend Judy to the mesa in the Carson National Forest where she and her mother have had a summer home for more than 30 years. Their small, real adobe—built by their own hands with the help of other family members and friends—sits in the middle of a scrubby expanse that allows them unobstructed views of Taos Mountain and the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. From their place, you can see across the Rio Grande Gorge to Taos. But sometimes these days, today an illustration, the view is obstructed by smoke from the Los Conchas fire. Right now, Judy is on the mesa finishing up closing down the house for another year. I helped with some of this process. In mid afternoon I headed back to Albuquerque, my car filled with her mother Joy’s clothes, sewing machine, remnants of old Navajo weavings that Joy had intended to start repurposing into totes, books to read, a blank canvas waiting for the brush, and more. Meanwhile, Joy waits at the Best Western near the Albuquerque airport for Judy to return and for the two of them to begin their journey back home—Joy to Tulsa, Judy to Ft. Worth. Their annual respite in northern New Mexico—this year only 8 days—came to a early end.

As I returned to Albuquerque in the afternoon, the haze from the fire was in the air, everywhere, even though the winds had not shifted, as they usually do in the afternoon. I made my way through Ojo Caliente and Espanola, where earlier in the day I had noticed at a convenience store an older fire truck, the man who was riding shotgun standing at the passenger door, his left leg on the running board, and his yellow t-shirt blackened with soot. They’ve just come out of the fire, I commented to Judy. On the return, for me, at the Los Alamos exit off of U.S. 285/84, I thought of a holiday weekend journey my friend Steve and I made to the Santa Clara Pueblo in 2009. It was Memorial Day, a day of remembrance that, according to history, was first celebrated in 1865, by Freedman (freed enslaved Blacks) to remember fallen Union Soldiers (Wikipedia). Most of us likely don’t know that. I didn’t know that. That Memorial Day weekend in 2009, Steve and I spent part of a Saturday afternoon on Puye Cliffs at the Santa Clara Pueblo, north of Santa Fe and near Los Alamos.

After that visit two years ago, I was urged to say: “Steve and I stood on a mesa in the Jemez Mountains overlooking a vast valley, where pinyon pine is repopulating itself. A planned burn grew out of control nine years ago. It made the national news for days. A young man of Santa Clara heritage, mingled with German from his maternal grandfather, was our guide through the remnants of dwellings dating to the 12th -16th century. He spoke eloquently of the history of the pueblo people, occasionally calling on his ancestral native Tewa language. His view of his world, our world, was as expansive and real and solid as the 360 degrees where we stood. ‘We are responsible for the clouds,’ he said. Drought had driven his people to the valley below four centuries past—by their belief because of improper behavior on their part."

Soon, the land will begin to heal. The pinyon pine will begin to repopulate itself. The wildlife lost to this fire will fulfill its nature. Everyone, including the people of Santa Clara, will heal, rebuild, and remember. But life has changed for everyone for today and forever. Ten years down the road someone will stand on Puye Cliffs, just as Steve and I did on that Saturday in 2009, and a guide will talk about the land, recounting the Los Conchas fire of 2011 and the Cerro Grande fire of 2000.

Each day we are offered the chance to be reborn, to be recast, to remember and move on, the better, although for the time, perhaps wearier. No one escapes the wildfire, regardless of how it looks. We are born of fire, like the Phoenix of Greek myth rising from the ashes. “We are each responsible for our life and how we create our reality, what we think, where we put our attention, our feelings,” Gayle reminded me two years ago. God, spare me from failing to remember and from starving in the midst of plenty.

“I release this prayer into the Divine Law knowing it is already so. I let go of all human attachment of what it should look like. I surrender, I allow and I let God. And so it is. Namaste.”

We Are Responsible for the Clouds, Reprise—Albuquerque, New Mexico (July 3, 2011)

R. Harold Hollis

Seemingly Perfect

The last four years have been tough. What irony. I’m living most of each year in the place I claim I’ve always wanted to be. The truth, however, is that except for the innocent impressions I have of a brief and hurried family trip in 1952 to visit my daddy’s older brother and his family in Santa Fe—the only real vacation our family ever took while my sisters and I were growing up—New Mexico had been, for all the years since I was nine, a seed lying dormant in my soul. I returned as a young adult and then missed another 20 years before returning again. All through that time, the west called me. For a while it was Colorado, where I had spent only a few days on a business trip in the 70s. There goes my life. What irony.

What I really knew of New Mexico before the year 2007 was limited to landing at the Albuquerque airport—either renting a car (or taking the shuttle)—and then heading to Santa Fe. For many of those years starting around 1988, I would visit my long-time Texas friends at their isolated summer place on a mesa in Taos County. The place has its romance. Mostly it’s their romance, their project, their sweat equity and money. For some 30 odd years they have journeyed to there, basically to work, but also to soak up the beauty of northern New Mexico. They’ve done so through the glory of their younger years, through divorce and death and loss of one stripe or another. It’s their story, and I participated only marginally. During these years, I would travel to Santa Fe with friends from Houston who came for reasons that—having now lived here for four years—I understand even better were simply about spending money—expensive lodging and food, and buying stuff. I don’t deny that it was great fun, especially the camaraderie.

Living here in New Mexico for most of the year each of the last four years, I am face to face with one profound truth. Wherever we are, we can feel lonely, and we can feel alone even though we are not. I suppose it is the loneliness that resides in my soul—my soul and no one else’s, even though I have no official claim to this loneliness—that brings me to this understanding. The more I live, the more I read and understand, the more I understand that I am face to face with my nature.

For four years—separated from what remains of my birth family and separated from the few friends with whom I’ve kept some form of contact—for family has always been the center of my life, what I was taught from the beginning—for four years in my seventh decade, I have lived the challenge of starting over in a new place. I’m not a social person, although I love the companionship of a friend or two, friends who like all friends love us in spite of our shortcomings—for that is what family and friends do, I’m told, I’ve read, I’ve lived. Being not a social person—a gregarious introvert, I’ve labeled myself—some days I try harder than others. Some days I feel like trying harder than others. Some days, not so much, not at all.

I remember the year 1980. I lived in Houston. I was in one of the three or four brief periods where I’ve seen a therapist. The issues never change. My fundamental nature never changes. At the time, I still ran a few miles a few times a week. What I recall is a summer afternoon, probably late in the day on a Friday, the beginning of evening. Running through one of the nice residential neighborhoods near my mid-town apartment, I saw through the large dining room window of a city ranch-style house a group of people gathering for dinner. I thought, how nice, and then, how alone I feel. Telling this to my therapist the following week, she reminded me—in a way it seems that she scolded me—for presuming that I could know how any one person in that group gathering around the table for dinner was feeling. Maybe there was ample loneliness in this seeming camaraderie. I remember thinking at the time, true, I don’t know. But it doesn’t matter, really. What we feel is valid, simply because we feel it. No question of right or wrong, perfect or imperfect, it is valid.

In this place that many people call the land of enchantment, I understand that it is only as enchanting as we allow it to become—only as enchanting as we are willing to live. Most likely it doesn’t matter where you choose to plant yourself—the so-called city different, or the big city they call the Duke, or the more remote mountain areas that are currently besieged by what is being called the worst wildfire in the history of the state, down south where the desert is more prominent, farther north into the mountains, where the liberals reside, where the conservatives make this place merely an extension of Texas—in the end it is just place. The true enchantment resides only in our hearts, in our souls.

If I allow myself to live and embrace my nature—maybe I can’t presume to deny this loneliness—if I allow myself to understand more, if I allow myself to look at my loneliness as if it doesn’t really belong to who I really am—I’ve read that this is possible—if I simply, profoundly allow myself, my walk here will be a better walk. I’ve chosen to be here. I came here alone. I have made friends here. I’ve chosen every situation, seemingly lovely or seemingly problematic. I said to a friend here the other day, as we talked about life, nothing is perfect. He countered that another way of looking at it is that everything is perfect. Everything is perfect, even the loneliness. I need to think about that.

Seemingly Perfect—Albuquerque, New Mexico (July 1, 2011)

R. Harold Hollis

None of My Business

I keep coming across some variation of a statement that goes something like this: “It’s none of my business what people say about me.” Now I’ve discovered that this puzzling observation apparently comes from the original material girl, Madonna. Having read that maybe I’m not supposed to care what others think and say about me has given me pause—several times. Being the long-time pleaser I am (truly I can trace the need to please to my childhood in the 1940s), what do I now do with this old, well-ingrained habit that is as much a part of me as the very skin I wear.

How do I please thee, let me count the ways. I want everyone to like me. I agonize over not disappointing others. Perceived failure to meet the perceived expectations of others quickly morphs into perceived rejection. Oh, what a terrible web I weave. When I see others behaving in a similar fashion, I shake my head in disbelief. My own habits worn by others don’t make sense to me at all.

If I began keeping a log of all the times during any given day that I trouble myself over things I’ve said or done or haven’t said or done, I could dig myself a mighty deep hole. I’ve learned of recent (can I really say I’ve learned anything when it hasn’t resulted in a change of behavior?) how useless is the pursuit of unpacking the past—as if it were a suitcase of things that have somehow made me comfortable over the years. In the last few years of her life, our mother enjoyed the Sunday sermons of a well-known Houston preacher who each week shepherds well over 40,000 souls at his gospel-of-prosperity church. One of the illustrations I heard him use several times was the image of the person trapped in the past, carrying fears, grudges and regrets around, like old clothes in a suitcase. Stop lugging around all that stuff. Stop opening that suitcase and loving each piece of its contents. As we watched, I thought, well, he’s got Mother pegged. Ah, but he had me pegged too. My own old suitcase remains ready and waiting, but maybe I’ve begun to believe that it holds little of use to me.

So, too, with troubling over the future, as I do especially when I wake in the night, unable to go back to sleep. I revisit the day, or two days ago, something I said or did, and somehow tomorrow carries a sucker punch that takes my breath away. “Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.” (Matthew 6:34) Lying there in bed in the middle of the night, I try to breathe myself into Now, and amazingly, at least for awhile, I let go of regret and anticipation.

It may be none of my business what others say about me. But I do care. I just don’t want to care so much. Teddy Roosevelt’s oldest child, Alice Roosevelt Longworth (1884-1980), supposedly said to someone at a dinner party, “If you haven't got anything nice to say about anybody, come sit next to me.” Funny, but it carries a truth that sends shivers up and down my spine. The next time I’m ready to sell someone down the river, let me be reminded that it may be none of their business, but it sure doesn’t help the progress of my soul on its journey. And so it is.

None of My Business—Albuquerque, New Mexico (June 15, 2011)

R. Harold Hollis

I have many choices