new mexico: valles caldera

I'm a member of the Caldera Poetry Collective, a quartet of poetesses who graduated in a cluster from the University of Minnesota's MFA program.  While there were many good things about the program (finding each other was, we agree, by far the best), I found there was a lot of complaining--easy to do, and, I thought, resolvable by ourselves.  If we need something we weren't getting on campus, why not create our own little tribe?  And here we are, so many years later, continuing to write with one another, sharing things we learn about, cheering each other on.

Last year, we went on a trip to the north woods of Minnesota, where three of us lived at the time.  I'd had Finnegan in February of that year and wasn't ready to travel so far on my own with him, so we put a pause on the big trip, which was a trek to see one of our namesakes:  the mysterious caldera.

A caldera itself is created by the collapse of land following a volcanic eruption.  Caldera is Spanish for cauldron.  Once we learned these two things, saw a few diagrams, we were hooked.  How amazing:  a vessel, veins of lava, a secret nature, a womb, a witchy pot.  Yes, our name, yes.

Here it is on a topographical map.  Do you see how it looks a bit like a bear's paw?  This is a sweet bonus for me:  I've called my daughter the bear ever since she growled at me while nursing.  In a nom-nom-nom sort of way, that is.

The first time we went, we took a van around the park to see the back country.  It was a shuttle van, meant to drop of hikers, but the driver was amiable and told us about movie sets and the process of cattle grazing.  We were told they graze the land in the summer, and there are no natural predators, though there are bear families, coyotes, and one mountain lion.  (We were very curious about this single big cat:  did it visit others on nearby formations?  Or was it lonely, prowling the curvature of this bowl?)  Also native:  elk and prairie dogs.  And prairie dogs.  As you can see, though I admit a bit of my increased photography was partly because it is one of the poet's favorite animals--though I won't thrust all the blame on pleasing her.  I also was thrilled to be able to creep so slowly and so close to these animals I've only ever seen in the zoo before.

The second time we went was on a self-guided tour, with one of the poets reading from the brochure.  We were able to spot a few places the elk had rubbed their antlers, consider what a seep might be, and generally romping around the skirt of one hump like the flatlanders that we are.

  I'm starting here because where else do I start?  This is the place--not specifically Valles, but this whole Jemez trip--where that dormant thing awoke, where I was rejiggered, returned, folded back into the values I'd let fade a bit.  And they're things I've touted before, as a mother, but ineffectively.  I've been a bit stuck, a bit exhausted, and that's a ridiculous spiral.  I have trouble grabbing onto things in my life:  I fall head over heels too often, though, in my favor, I am terribly loyal.  But when I'm in, I'm all in, and I have to learn to ride that properly--to control it so that I don't feel as if I'm being controlled.  I'm hoping this is one way to do this, to keep myself measured, as opposed to flamboyant and then distilled.  What I'm hoping for is some kind of peace:  with myself, as I am, with either the see-sawing passions or finding a way to balance it all out.  You see, I can swoon over poetry and literature with the best of them, but then I get so tired of it all and my well dries up completely and eventually I want nothing to do with this part of my brain but instead can only knit, can only sew, want to try new things in the world of textiles--forget words!  Only my hands, my hands!  So this is a place for my hands.  For my hands and my feet, for my eyes and my lungs.  For my body, for movement, for rhythm, for meting it all out.