BLOG 91— (present reflections tied to March 2001 journal entries about my healing journey)—The sun paints the sky in bright pink, orange, and grey-blue streaks as it sets here in New Mexico. Our Sandia mountains reflect the evening like the inside of a watermelon. And on the weekends, after a week of finding play and joy in my work, my shared home, Casa de Duende, becomes a place of retreat with late breakfast on the patio, Friday nigh
t movies, and walks above fallen leaves with my love.
Years ago, in my late twenties, when I first came here to New Mexico, I was so much more restless than today. I arrived from the East Coast eager to connect spiritually and to experience magic…to see some apparition appear from behind a burning bush, or to discover I could fly, or at least soar as spirit to places beyond the physical and material limitations that were so rigidly held on the East Coast. I was ready for anything, as long as it was grandiose and magical. What happened though, was anything but this.
In my search for magic, I became broken. The greater my hunger for magic, for something outside of me to fill the emptiness inside, the more I broke. In my journal of March of 2001, I reflected on this search for magic, and how, five year
s prior to that, a strong sense of longing to feel life in a big way, to feel spirit, to feel alive, to fill up from the outside in, led to my injury. In my journal of that spring, I wrote, “I spent all my time chasing magic, when really what I wanted was to open my heart and feel. My heart was the universe and I wanted to be able to tune into my heart, to all that I had felt so numb toward.”
In that March, 2001 journal entry, I concluded that “If I believe my heart has a voice and something to express, then there will be magic in my life that will only grow.”
Five years before my journal entry, in my late twenties—more than 20 years ago—I was called to New Mexico, where I landed, uncertain as to why. What I do know is that back then I longed so desperately for that magic and spiritual connection—that connection to that sense of God I had no name for back then. Today, as I look around me, I see the magic in front of me. It’s in my heart, and my ability to feel and receive the beauty 
around me. It’s in watching the sunset, in sharing my life with my love and partner, in many walks and moments with friends, in the laughter, play, and celebration of our lives together.
As I watch this modern world and its elites wielding for more power and money, I’m saddened by how much we’ve neglected this life, our earth, and its magic that weaves a colorful fabric into our lives. In our need to fill up with more, to pour more into the emptiness, we allow the forests to burn, temperatures to rise, floods to clean away the excess of all that we live. We neglect the poor, those who have so little and need community and care, and in doing so, bit by bit, we destroy our common home.
Maybe opening our hearts and learning to feel and receive the beauty around us, and to love each other and what we have just a bit more, could be what saves us. Maybe, instead of looking for magic and more to fill the emptiness, we wake up to ourselves, to our beating hearts longing to feel again this love that is here and now.
My Novel, Child of Duende: A Journey of the Spirit, is a story of returning home to the earth inside and all around us. It’s now available in Spanish as Niña Duende: Un Viaje del Espiritu, that’s available on Amazon at Amazon Page or at www.michelleadam.net. It was soon be published by the Spanish publisher Corona Borealis and the Portuguese publisher, Edições Mahatma. It can be ordered at a local bookstore or directly from me (for those outside of the U.S.) as well. Also, watch a brief video on “duende”, “the spirit of the earth”: YouTube Video
know what power or being in our power means. We come into the world needing food, water, love…all the basics…and we rely on those who raise us to provide these necessities so we can grow strong. Some of us are more fortunate than others. I see many of my students come from families who nourish them well, yet others struggle to grow in what seems like an asphalt of a childhood.
al connection to the earth. It cuts us off from source, like plants attempting to grow from above the ground.”
ue selves? How do we stop giving our power to others and stand inside ourselves with love?
th.”
of unbridled greed sinks its claws into more power and wealth; and as more and more of the same short-sighted living leads to the destruction of life for all of us on this planet called Earth. And I look at my own busy life, from teaching, writing, and publishing, and I think how special it was to have truly stopped 20 years ago, to have stepped off of that train of life (even if it was by kicking and screaming) and to have sat still long enough, as Neruda described, to “interrupt this sadness of never understanding ourselves”
“Permission is in the shadows. Answers are what I have invented, what I have held onto so tightly, in order to fill the silence of myself. The true answers are in the space of waiting for clarity to present its gift to me.”
what life’s pain was able to teach me. Those years gave me wisdom and love (and a novel, Child of Duende), which grew within me because I had to face myself, day in and day out, with nowhere to hide. Every time I tried to run from my pain, to solve the problem in front of me, I faced a mirror that was myself…that part of me that is as small as a grain of sand, and as large as the universe…that part of me that is nature, that is life, that is love. Then all the lessons, all the shoulds of this fast-moving train of modern life, shed from my skin, from my bones, to leave me with a delicious taste of a deep silence, a deep stillness where life speaks and continues to speak, even today, when I slow down to listen.
Michelle Adam 