I am returned to Santa Fe, NM.  I really do love this place.  It's as if someone picked up a town very like Nawlins and stuck it in the middle of the desert.  This place/experience has helped me to grow and given me a safe ground to do it.  I recognize now that provided the right kind of timing/experience, my life here could have been better.  And there was a lot that was awesome: school, church, (for a while) the club where i worked, the social scene.  I felt appreciated and even loved.  (I'm including my time in California and Colorado as I speak of this.)  I came here following romantic love and a spiritual set of  dreams.  Neither paid off in an immediate way but things here have been pretty nice overall.  There were long stretches of emptiness and aimlessness also - I have to say that.  But it's damn beautiful country.  (And it takes a Santa Fean to make an event out of Monday night karaoke at the Cowgirl.  I will definitely miss that.) 

Santa Fe is more like camp than anything.  It's awesome and a fun retreat and spiritual and all good, but it's too clean and too safe to really be home.  And everything that was good about it was what reminded me of the old country.  There are many connections between the two cities, as I've said before, and as folk other than me have established.

Sometimes, home calls.  The river sings out its moonlight song, and the riverboat reminds me of everything I ever lost and gained in the city of New Orleans.  Home is where the kids are, as one of my teachers tells me, and Nawlins is where mine were unborn and buried.  Home is what we gamble everything for.  Home is where I am betrayed and most deeply loved.  Home is a place that needs you.  Home is sometimes sick and dying, but she's always being reborn.  Home is living on the edge.  Home is insane. And home is, most deeply and desperately, a place of magick.

I've gotta go back.