Albuquerque, May 2024

I’ve been in Albuquerque since Monday. It’s not my first trip, but rather a place I have come to regularly since 2015. My husband came with me on that trip, and we played golf at Paako Ridge; he explored the city while I did some volunteer work for a few hours every day. We hiked the Petroglyph National Monument before we went home on the 2015 trip. We visited the Albuquerque Zoo when we traveled here in 2004. His daughter was undergoing breast cancer treatment at that time and we were vulnerable, scared, angry without knowing it. We went to the zoo to kill time before a flight home to Texas. I forgot all about this first trip in 2004 until I started writing this post. A lot can change in 20 years: a daughter can die; a marriage can survive, just barely at times; memories can float up to the surface; you can bump into a Buddhist monk on your way to the restroom in the airport and remember all you have is this very moment. Pain is inevitable, a heart can open and close. Life is filled with mistakes and surprises.

I was a broken woman, spiritually, in 2015, and a bunch of people who share my disease rekindled my spirit over the last nine years. I didn’t know what I needed in 2015, only that someone asked me to help out and I felt alive for the first time in a long while.