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
Michelle Adam 