Posted on August 24, 2024 by Jenn Zatopek

Although Texas is home, I don’t always feel safe or supported here. Growing up in the country afforded me lots of time outdoors on long summer days, where I’d run along the white gravel roads, passing acres of tall oak and hackberry trees, picking blackberries with my best friend J, swimming at the local lake bordered by low limestone walls amid shrubby juniper trees. I found safety and security in the friendly trees, the cool waters, the open sky where I’d fling prayers upwards when I was scared, which was often. One of the best gifts my parents gave me was their love of the outdoors, and if I had to pick a place called home, I’d say it’s wherever I can go outside and slip into the landscape, remembering my true belonging. 

I had such an opportunity on my last visit to Santa Fe, where my partner and I hiked in the sacred Taos Mountains, the high desert hills at Galisteo Reserve south of town, at the mountains just thirty minutes north of the city up long winding roads surrounded by forest. Santa Fe feels ancient, like there’s ancestors walking the city streets and whispering in the adobe architecture, and the city is hemmed in by mountain ranges on all sides, making me feel held. As we hiked, I relaxed and felt nourished by the steady presence of the mountains, something I’d been longing for since the hot Texas summer began. 

We also frequented a local coffee shop known for its quintessential New Mexican flair and felt right at home with the modern art, vintage decor, and plants climbing the walls, home being a place transcending time and space which feels like love. I worked on the memoir I’d been avoiding back in Texas, and between sweet cups of chai, cool desert air, and daily visits to the mountains, I found my voice again, found the self I had misplaced back in my home state. 

Hiking into the Taos Mountains was particularly splendid, especially when we drove into an intense thunderstorm just outside the Taos River Gorge. The sky darkened ominously and rain pelted the windshield as we drove along the narrow two-lane highway amid enormous mountains and pulled into the small gravel lot at the trailhead. Waiting out the storm, my partner slept while I read a book by a gay Irishman writing about the perils and pleasures of being in Christian community, sprinkling in bits of Zen with the koan mu and his plea for inquiry, sitting with beautiful questions and waiting for light to arise in our answers, changing our stories. 

As the rain fell steadily, I thought about someone I love who is leaving me, how hope feels like a dirty dangerous word in this situation. What do you do with love that has nowhere to go? Then I read his words on hope and the sun came out, the rain stopped, and something inside me shifted as I hiked up that mountain with my partner. Perhaps hope isn’t as foolish as someone would say but a necessary practice, a conscious intention, a call to release despair. Hope and grief are lovers; you can’t have one without the other.

We hiked that day up the long winding path through the canyon amid fragrant evergreens wet with rain while the sounds of the mountain stream rushed below us. Sunflowers and wild raspberry bushes joined us on the path and we spied chipmunks and hermit thrushes and violet-green birds flitting above us, our happiness expanding the longer we climbed up the mountain. I thought of my father and his decades-long estrangement from me, something that’s taken me years to understand and forgive, and his last words on his deathbed to his then-girlfriend: Tell Jennifer I love her. He died thinking of me, and he refused to reconcile with me in life, both heartbreaking and true. Many years ago, I told this story with bitterness in my mouth, but now I tell it with healing, hope like forgiveness being a home in which I can become more myself too. He could not have done otherwise given everything that happened to him and to us. 

Home becomes not only a mountain I can climb or lake waters I can swim in, but a practice in which I recall all my moments with tenderness, for myself and the others whom I’ve been privileged to know and love. Hope is for us in the end. The wounds of loving those who left have been healed with psychotherapy, meditation, and more; it removes the sting of loss but not the love I share with them still. Perhaps this is another shade of hope, to live as if our love is real and matters even now. I don’t forget my father or the one leaving, because we are still inextricably connected in the strange web of love, home becoming a safe place inside my skin that holds me in the darkness of hurt but also the lightness of remembered joy too.

Image: Sangre de Cristo Mountains outside Santa Fe, New Mexico