Taos conversation

The United States has a long, shameful history of destroying the culture of its Indigenous people. This poetic reflection narrates an experience of mine at the ancient site of the Taos Pueblo in New Mexico. This UNESCO World Heritage Site, open to visitors and closed during sacred ceremonies, provoked a somatic shift in me. I chose to write about the shift using the intimacy of poetic language to blur the boundary between self and environment, human body and Earth body, subject and object. For there to be a change in how humans regard the environment, it seems helpful to hike into the wilderness and sleep under the stars, an embodied experience that can heighten perceptions, which then informs the language used to write about the natural world.