WHEN MY SISTER CAME TO SANTA FE AND I BECAME SANTA'S FEY BROTHER

A Report Two Weeks After Shoulder Surgery

(Above: My sister Karole Sessums and our friend Ali MacGraw, who lives in Santa Fe, in Karole’s Winnebago/Mercedes RV after our having a birthday lunch inside it for another mutual friend, Santa Fean Jeffrey Brezovar)

I first visited Santa Fe thirty years ago on assignment from Vanity Fair to do a story about photographer Herb Ritts and his new home here. Herb and I did many stories together at Vanity Fair where I was both its Fanfair Editor and a Contributing Editor as well as at Andy Warhol’s Interview where I was its Executive Editor. Herb was also a friend. He died of complications from AIDS in 2002. I have long missed him, and have missed him anew on this third visit to this place he loved so much. This is how I began the story which also included his mother Shirley, who died in 2008. Re-reading the story this morning had an added elegiac element to it that elided with the flouncing though, yes, friendly flippancy of its opening tone. I wrote:

“‘Hello, I'm Kirsten, Herb Ritts's housekeeper,’ the woman tells me as I shake her outstretched hand welcoming me to Santa Fe, New Mexico. Her face is the kind you'd expect to belong to the housekeeper of a man who has made his millions by photographing the great female faces of the world, its terrain weathered, like the New Mexican landscape, into a quiet beauty. Beauty is indeed Santa Fe's biggest industry. Art, jewelry, antiques, and music—along with the rare air of its grand vistas—have always made this the part of the American West which belongs to that most special of pioneer spirits, not the cowboy but the aesthete. Ritts feels right at home riding his horses here.

"‘Herb is arriving tonight from Los Angeles, but you've come to meet his mother,’ Kirsten confirms for me. ‘You can't miss her—she's the one wearing the yellow cowboy boots.’

“In the lobby of the Eldorado Hotel, Shirley Ritts breezes up to me with the same pulled-together elan that helped her breeze right past retirement age. For years an interior designer, she has been coaxed back into service by her son. As she approaches, I can see that there is nothing weathered about this face; it is sleek with age. She is wearing—along with the yellow boots—black tights, a black jacket, and a pair of big black Chanel sunglasses, on which the jeweled double C of the company's logo is as prominently displayed as a rancher's brand on the butt of a steer. She doesn't slow down until we are both seated in Kirsten's Saab on our way up to her son's newest property, on which she is putting her finishing touches after almost three years of work. ‘They don't build fast here,’ she tells me. ‘But they have wonderful excuses.’

“‘They're very artistic,’ Kirsten says, defending her fellow Santa Feans.

"‘I don't want them to be artistic,’ says Shirley. ‘I just want them to follow orders.’ She turns to me in the backseat. ‘To do what I do takes being a general.’

"‘So where are we headed?’ I ask.

"‘To the top of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains,’ Kirsten says. ‘Sangre de Cristo, the Blood of Christ.’

“‘I'm not too crazy about that name,’ says Shirley.

"‘The house is on a dirt road?’ I ask as we head up one straight toward a mountain peak

"‘That's great prestige around here,’ claims Kirsten. ‘It makes the property more valuable.’”

Further back at Interview, I did a cover story on Sam Shepard who told me the places he had lived and their weather affected his writing. One of those places was Santa Fe for a time but he had soured on it. “It just became inundated with Texas oil people,” he told me. “And the face of the town changed completely. It became like a shopping mall with adobe siding. It got weird. You couldn’t even get across the downtown Plaza for the tourists. It’s amazing country. The town itself used to be great. In the ‘50s and the ‘60s it was great. But it went the shopping mall way, y’know.”

Last fall I gave up everything I owned to set off on a cultural and spiritual pilgrimage. I am writing a book about it and put Santa Fe on my itinerary after my first six months in London and Paris because of the shopping mall aspect of the town’s shaman industry which I glibly referred to as healing for those hopped up on Hopis and hope. I was a bit off geographically - northeastern Arizona is home for the Hopi tribe - but being a stickler for facts has never stood in the way when a clever sentence is at stake. I knew such a book needed a chapter with a, yes, flouncy friendly flippant tone to relieve some of the hard-earned earnestness at the heart of the initial impulse to write it. Plus, Ali MacGraw had moved here after losing everything she owned when her home in Malibu had burned and I thought with much less flippancy but with wells of love for her as a friend that she could give me another perspective about simplifying one’s life since fate had intervened to force her hand instead of purposefully losing everything like me. The results were the same - loss leading to simplification - but the instigation - fate vs. forethought - were different. That difference leading to a sameness interested me as something to explore more deeply.

But it was the surface of the place - the PR equipoise of crystal healing with heaps of turquoise jewelry - that at first glibly interested me. If I were going to write a book that has healing as one of its narrative threads, I might as well head to this town that has it as one of its own, so much so that it is part of its marketing of itself for tourism. I was thinking of all this as I was heading to Orly Airport my last night in Paris for a week-long stopover in New York City on my way here to Santa Fe when my life changed in a second and I was suddenly - shatteringly - in need of the kind of physical healing I was not expecting on my spiritual pilgrimage.

As I was walking down some steep Paris Metro stairs with a heavy suitcase on the night of April 30th, I missed the second step. All I can remember is screaming and flying forward toward the fall and the next thing I can recall is the blue flashing lights of the ambulance arriving and seeing in its flickering arrival all the shocked French faces standing around a bloodied me - a deep gash on my right knee that would require suturing in the emergency room where I spent the night, a bruised nose that bled for hours, a bleeding scabrous forehead, and a, yes, a shattered right shoulder shot through with pain that seemed to still be in the process of pulverizing it and that would require major reparative surgery which would result in more pain that is the accompaniment of my writing this column as I peck it out with one finger on my left hand.

There is much to write about that night that changed my life and living with a broken shoulder for over two weeks as I flew to New York the next day and after a week in the city doing all that I had planned to do then flying to Santa Fe to await my surgery here. I have not only already written about it a lot on my social media platforms but also will delve more deeply into it all in the book I am writing about my pilgrimage for the first thing I thought when I was thinking clearly again after the initial shock and trauma that blurred my thoughts to such an extent that I forgot where I was and then why I was there and for how long once I realized I was in Paris was that this was all great narrative for the book I also remembered I was writing. Was it a crucible - all pilgrimages are confronted with one at some point - that would spur my creative spirit or was it itself one of my own creation by not being mindful enough?

One thing that certainly resulted was my changing my mind about Santa Fe. All my glib references to it and its healing industry manifested in my physical need to heal here as if I were the unintentional shaman conjuring such a need. I have come to believe that time is simultaneous not linear because realties are plural and parallel and thus the occurrence of my fall was always happening in that last second of my six months in London and Paris and was waiting for my arrival at it to complete itself. Santa Fe is the kind of place where I can say such a thing aloud and be taken seriously and not have to deal with the eye-rolling leeriness of the logical whose own creative logistics are more myopically, comfortably located in the seen world than in its unseen aspects; they make room for physics but shut the metaphoric door on mysticism. Metaphors are the portals not only to my writerly life lived as narrative but also I am beginning to realize - this is part of my pilgrimage - one experienced as a mystic. Metaphors are a literary form of parallel realties - the thing that is not the thing but more deeply the thing.

There is certainly a heightened mystical aspect to kindness and surrender and acceptance and familial bonds based on boundless love. I have experienced it deeply here these last weeks in Santa Fe with the heightened coincidental connective instances of it that I have documented on social media as if the pain I have endured has been balanced by a higher frequency not fraught with the human need for it - from my Airbnb host Heather, a craniosacral therapist, who offered to work on my head and neck to relieve some of the trauma still captured there by putting me on her massage table in the backyard by the tiny house in which I have been staying to my orthopedic surgeon Luke getting approval from my New York Medicare/Advantage plan to do my surgery out-of-network by writing in his appeal about the spiritual pilgrimage that brought me here to Santa Fe to the old friends who dropped cash into my Venmo account to enable me to rent a car for my sister to drive while she came out from Tennessee to care for me to the new Santa Fe friends who have shopped for groceries and done some of my laundry and taken me out to eat and picked me up from a doctor’s appointment and shown me that the showering of joy is so needed in lives that have learned to live unnaturally in the arid lack of it. But it is my sister who has been downright uplifting for me with her angelic presence and her unconditional love. I told my friend Ali - who has come to love my sister Karole almost as profoundly as I - that I felt guilty about Karole’s putting her own life on-hold and heading out here to nurse me back to a semblance of normalcy as she paid witness to my pain. “You live a life defined by words more than most of us do. So why don’t we change that word,” she told me when I confessed to her how guilty I was feeling, this woman as winning and wise as she once was winning and winsome. “Let’s not call it guilt. Let’s call it love.”

(Above: My Airbnb host Heather explaining some of the craniosacral therapy she was about to do on me. That’s her dog Foxy - my part-time roommate - keeping watch.)

The week after my surgery - hoping for wisdom though feeling neither winning nor winsome - I even travelled to Albuquerque to speak about my writer’s life to students and faculty at the Southwestern Indian Polytechnic Institute and tape an interview later for its website. Between the two, I visited my nephew Price, who is finishing up an orthopedic surgery fellowship in the city, and his wife Mary Grace, who is an internist, and their 10-month-old son Neal. It was the first time I had met him. He is my first grandnephew. When Neal’s paternal grandfather, my brother Kim, an ob/gyn and renowned sculptor back in Mississippi, texted that Neal might be scared of my new white beard, I texted back that I would tell him that I was Santa’s sissy brother. Meeting Neal I felt the instant instinctual mystical warmth of familial love for him within me which felt more healing than any rehab could offer. I also told Neal during our first conversation that if he decides he doesn't like playing with the football I presumed was already in his nursery somewhere that he can come talk to me, his Great Auntie Mame. Price laughed and said Mary Grace has already made it clear she is not interested in embedding false masculine constructs in him. Being so close by in Santa Fe enabled me to have this special day.

Indeed, I had false constructs embedded in me about Santa Fe that needed to be freed by the pain more deeply embedded inside me that has found such important initial ways to heal here by acknowledging and accepting and feeling love in a new light. I feel, in fact, the light here even more than I appreciate the land and its vistas. Willa Cather in her novel set here, Death Comes for the Archbishop, wrote, “Elsewhere the sky is the roof of the world; but here the earth was the floor of the sky. The landscape one longed for when one was far away, the thing all about one, the world one actually lived in, was the sky, the sky!” I have begun to understand the place in terms that have nothing to do with earthbound geography just as my healing that has begun here is deeper than just about my body.

The other day Karole and Ali and I threw a birthday lunch for our friend Jeffrey in Karole’s RV which she drove out from Tennessee. Ali gave Jeffrey the book The Art of Stillness: Adventures in Going Nowhere by Pico Iyer as a birthday gift. She read aloud to us its last page after he unwrapped it:

“In an age of speed, I began to think, nothing could be more invigorating than going slow.

“In an age of distraction, nothing can feel more luxurious than paying attention.

“And in an age of constant movement, nothing is more urgent than sitting still.

“You can go on vacation to Paris or Hawaii or New Orleans three months from now, and you’ll have a tremendous time, I’m sure. But if you want to come back feeling new - alive and full of fresh hope and in love with the world - I think the place to visit may be Nowhere.”

Cather also wrote in Death Comes for the Archbishop: “The Miracles of the Church seem to me not to rest so much upon faces or voices or healing power coming suddenly near to us from afar off, but upon our perceptions being made finer, so that for a moment our eyes can see and our ears can hear what is there about us always.”

My perceptions have been made finer here in Santa Fe for this month-long moment of surgery and love and light and painfully letting go of old constructs while I, physically crippled but spiritually renewed, lumber onward on my pilgrimage without the human need to lasso “lumber” here out west to its noun version as I further let go of home as a construction in need of any other material than my metaphoric heart as I live this narrative life. I am coming to understand the act of writing as being sentenced to a miracle. Santa Fe has taught me that, too. It has been my Nowhere because it is everywhere I needed to be.