In the Land of Enchantment

Vol. 84

In This Issue: ESSAY | NOW READ THIS | PHOTO GALLERY 

There’s been a lot on my mind lately. Hard to know what to focus on long enough to write about. So much pain and stress and suffering in the world around me. People everywhere under threat, all of us just trying our best to withstand the worst humanity has to throw at ourselves. I wanted to write about the escalating attacks against my fellow trans and gender non-conforming people across the U.S. I wanted to write about the flagrantly illegal, immoral war launched by the Trump regime against Iran at the behest of Israel. I wanted to write about my neighbors and fellow human beings still being snatched up and disappeared by ICE, held in inhumane conditions, and the ways that others are fighting back. I wanted….

Instead, I took a vacation. Technically, it was a work trip, but one with overwhelming joy and time to get away from my phone screen and into deep relations with real life human beings and a stunning natural landscape.

Specifically, I spent the week in northern New Mexico, first with a group of people from around the world who I’m fortunate to call colleagues, and then some time on my own. I’m immensely grateful to have had the opportunity–a privilege, absolutely–and that I got to spend so much time outside, exploring a part of the country I’ve never visited before. 

Santa Fe was lovely, if a little overrun by bougie white folks and very expensive art. If you focus on the local working people/artists and the indigenous past and present of the area, you’ll have a much better time, in my humble opinion. I barely had time to scratch the surface but the culture there is rich and deep and complex and incredible.

For instance, we met hundreds of recently returned, beautifully crafted pieces of pottery at the Poeh Cultural Center on the Pojoaque Pueblo, where the people are maintaining and honoring the Tewa-speaking communities and continuing to return objects taken by white institutions over the years. In their culture, every object is thought to be imbued with spirit. The return of these sometimes hundreds-of-years-old bowls and jugs and pots is, therefore, an intensely powerful thing. They’ve been welcomed home as the long-lost ancestors they are.

We also visited Bandelier National Monument, where we walked the Pueblo Loop Trail and saw the remains of an Ancestral Pueblo great house, great kiva, and cliff dwellings where some of the original murals can still be seen. The site was occupied from approximately 1100 to 1550 CE and is just one of hundreds of villages, cities, and outposts of an entire civilization that called the Four Corners region home for well over a thousand years. Walking in these places sometimes feels like time travel. The high, dry desert air preserves things remarkably well. 

On my own time, I went to the Jemez Historic Site, where the clash of colonial Spanish power with local communities can be seen in stark relief. On the site of a 700-year-old Ancestral Pueblo village called Gisewa (now part of modern Jemez Springs, just off the Jemez Pueblo/Walatowa), the ruins of a 17th century Spanish church called San José de los Jémez loom alongside the walls and kiva of the village. It was occupied until 1680, when the various Pueblo nations united in what would become the only successful indigenous revolt against colonial powers in what’s now the United States, the Pueblo Revolt.

All is quiet there now. I was the only person walking the trails and exploring the ruined church on the day I went, accompanied only by the songs of juniper titmouse and pine siskins in the tree-lined ravine nearby.

I was able to find more gorgeous solitude at the nearby Red Rock Trail, on the Jemez Pueblo (and requiring a small trail fee from the Walatowa Visitor Center to access). The sandy trail is lined with yucca plants, club-cholla cacti, juniper trees, and (thanks to recent rain) a few, startling pops of colorful flowers blooming: evening primrose, prickleaf gilia, red bluet, and Fendler’s bladdercap. The path loops around enormous rocky, bright red cliff formations in all directions, a bloody slash through the otherwise tan-colored landscape of Jemez. Eventually, you’re led into the shade of a towering slot canyon, where a few, huge ravens cackled at me from high perches overhead.

The other benefit of staying in Jemez Springs are, obviously, the natural hot springs dotting the area. It’s been a bucket list item for me for many years to take a dip in a hot spring and I couldn’t imagine a more beautiful place for it. It was especially good given how dry the air is up there. I watched a hummingbird moth inelegantly dive-bomb the hot spring water to drink from while I soaked. We were both appreciating the local gifts in our own ways.

I am glad to be home in this place of watery abundance. I never fully appreciate the good fortune us Great Lakes folks have until I go somewhere without so much fresh water. My skin and the inside of my nose sure feel it. 

Still, every place is precious. Every place is worth our care. People have lived in the sometimes harsh, always beautiful high desert lands of the Four Corners for a very long time. They are still there, tending the land in the ways they know best. The difference now, I think, is the continued imposition of colonial rule and all its attendant disconnect from the wisdom and needs of local communities, and its refusal to allow full self-determination or make good on past agreements. New Mexico is one of the poorest (measured by the poverty rate) states in the nation. Across the Four Corners, especially among the Navajo/Diné, 30% of families lack a sink or a toilet in their homes. Despite previous court precedent and past treaties, the U.S. Supreme Court in 2023 ruled that the federal government is not obligated to ensure access to water for the Navajo Nation. As though we couldn't afford such a thing.

So while our country is throwing billions of dollars at war-making, our own people go without basic necessities. Even in that stunning landscape, I couldn’t avoid the realities of the ways our society is not working for so many people. At the same time, I also couldn’t avoid the realities of the ways in which so many people are still finding ways to care for one another, in defiance of the odds and the status quo. Indigenous people and their allies are still fighting to have their rights recognized and supported, while fundraising to get needs met right now. They’re rebuilding sovereignty and caring for the land and returning lost relatives to their homes. 

Native people across the continent have shown us that it’s not only possible to survive an apocalypse without losing one’s humanity, but that it is indeed the only way to survive such calamity. It’s a lesson the rest of us would do well to take to heart in this increasingly dark time of rising fascism and accelerating climate crisis.

Sometimes, I really do just need to step away from my usual routine and, as the saying goes, “touch grass” (or hot springs and piñón pines, in this case) for a while to refresh and reorient my energy and spirit. Whether that’s by going to a new-to-me-landscape or into my backyard, it really does make a difference. 

Where have you been going for rest and restoration? Leave a comment with your own recommendations!

Now Read This.

“The zombie dressed up as an ordinary Tuesday” [Kelly Hayes]

The forced choreography of everyday life continues, even as the stage is dismantled beneath our feet. We can stumble and weep our way through our routines, or we can cry out as a chorus that what’s happening is grotesque, and must be opposed. As ever, the question is not simply what we are saying or doing, but who we are speaking with and acting alongside.

“The Olympics Has a New Sex Testing Policy. The Evidence Doesn’t Add Up.” [Reo Eveleth for Coyote]

When you start looking into the modern era of sex testing, and the athletes who have been impacted, it doesn't take long to notice something. Every woman who I am aware of who has been flagged and singled out under gender verification policies since 2009 is a Black or brown woman from the Global South. Most of them are from Africa. Human rights organizations, like the UN and Human Rights Watch, have specifically highlighted this issue, arguing that this disparity suggests that there is something going on beyond simply “science.”

“Mike Johnson’s institutional betrayal” [Don Moynihan for Can We Still Govern?]

Who holds the power of the purse? Congress or the President? Mike Johnson has a clear answer: it’s Trump. Our constitutional scheme of governance is less important than enforcing our new personalist regime. And if Trump needs to break a law or two to try to patch up the fallout, so be it.

“The Ghosts of Al-Shifa Hospital” [Spencer Ackerman for WIRED]

Doctors told WIRED the public-health crisis they witnessed looked to them more like a new phase of the genocide than its aftermath. During this phase, the Israelis no longer need to open fire to kill Palestinians, though they still do that, too.

“Petromasculinity is eating itself and destroying us all” [Amy Westervelt for Drilled]

What's also easy to see in the current moment is that petromasculinity is a threat to everything, even itself. In their eagerness to "cancel" renewables and equality and human rights and blast everyone in the face with hydrocarbons instead, the petrobros have flown too close to the sun. Though the industry and the politicians who carry water for it are still trying to push their fossil-fueled "energy dominance" and "energy security" messages, they are increasingly falling on deaf ears. The chorus falls flat in the face of two energy- and economy-destabilizing wars in four years.

“Confronting the CEO of the AI company that impersonated me” [Nillay Patel for The Verge]

Back in August of last year, Grammarly shipped a feature called Expert Review, which allowed you to get writing suggestions from AI-cloned “experts,” and reporters at The Verge and other outlets discovered that those experts included us. It included me.

Great follow-up analysis of that interview and the overall problem with generative AI products: “Sloppelgängers” [Parker Molloy at The Present Age]

Mehrotra and his company couldn’t see the consent problem, so they couldn’t see the quality problem either. If you don’t think you need someone’s permission to use their name, you’re certainly not going to check whether the advice you’re generating under that name is any good. Why would you? You don’t think you owe them anything. The feature was bad for the same reason it existed at all: because the people who built it genuinely did not consider the humans attached to those names to be stakeholders in the process.

“What America gets wrong about Jeffrey Epstein” [Tarana Burke for TIME]

If we label Epstein a “monster,” we whitewash the environment that created, fostered, and abetted him. The real lesson of the Epstein files is this: we built the world that made him possible. Epstein was not the disease. He was a symptom. And symptoms don’t disappear without treatment. 

“The Knives Are Out: Inside the Most Dangerous Leak in Washington” [I Fucking Love Australia]

American taxpayers have sent hundreds of billions of dollars to Israel over the decades. Hundreds of billions. And the return on that investment? The Prime Minister of that country just walked into the most powerful office on Earth, showed a senile president a sizzle reel, and talked him into spending even more American blood and treasure fighting a war that serves Israeli strategic interests. And nobody stopped him. Nobody in that room had the balls to say, “Hang on, are we seriously making the biggest military decision of the decade based on a fucking mood board from the bloke who’s been on our payroll since 1948?”

Photo Gallery

I took a lot of photos in New Mexico and thought you might enjoy them, too:

‘Til Next Time

Take care of yourself and of each other. Free Palestine. Abolish ICE.

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