Hurricane Dean is thrashing Jamaica. Courageous firefighters lost their life in a raging blaze near Ground Zero. The news is full of scary events, full of murder and mayhem and politicians pounding their chests. But life goes on, surprises us, delights us, hands us moments mundane, precious, even in the midst of the most unsettling news.

A Hopi kachina watches my computer screen from over my right shoulder. He wears a sanded leather loincloth over ochre skin, collar and cuffs of soft maple rabbit. He stands two-feet high, but he feels as tall as a man. His protruding eyes burn my back, transmit an ancient message of sure-footed joy. You will dance and you will like it, he mutters. You will run and you will jump.

A young man I know fell off an outcropping of granite this summer, fell eight vertical feet, fell into a six-week land of cast and crutch and exotic metal pins. Shattered tibia. Surgery. June plans as broken, as painful as his swollen skin. I wanted to sign his cast, the blue sheath that hid the parallel scars, but he refused my pen. "I don't want any signatures. I just want everyone to leave me alone."

The clouds that blanket the Plains of San Augustin rarely notice the science traveler, the Mescalero Apache, the patchwork family with a bag of marshmallows and one unused match. The clouds push from Arizona toward Texas, push across the reservation, the dried lake flats, push past the twenty-seven radio antennas without a second glance. Every time I drive past the installation, I feel those wandering jewels mock me, tell me I don't belong in this wilderness.

Vivian Vance and her sister owned the house I call my own. They lived in this simple cracked-stucco box on the edge of the Great Plains, where Mother Earth New Mexico gives birth to a flat-chested Oklahoman girl, a long-legged Texas boy. When Vivian as Ethel Mertz told Lucy Ricardo that she grew up in the Land of Enchantment, she wasn't kidding. I imagine her tooling along the Turquoise Trail outside of Santa Fe in a silver-finned convertible while her handkerchief-covered curls catch white sage and sharp bits of tumbleweed. On purpose, of course. Vivian was that kind of gal.