My Secret Place - June 2010
By Diego Romero, as told to Devon Jackson
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The Santa Fe River is my favorite place to go meditate. I started going down there after I bought my house in Santa Fe on West Alameda in 2005. It’s only about 50 yards from the river, across the bridge near Frenchy’s Field. I like to walk that strip of river. They paved it, but in the beginning it was just dirt.
I found myself going down there a lot during my divorce.
I’d go a half-mile out and back, and meditate on everything that was going good in my life and everything to be grateful for: my daughter, my health. Now I’ll go down there to collect my thoughts. I usually go down there with this woe-is-me-this-sucks attitude: the bills are piling up, my wife’s left me. But when I come back, I’m grateful for my life, my hands, my beautiful daughter. I come back with a whole new attitude.
It focuses me on being grateful.
When my daughter, Cricket, and I would go down there earlier, we had a game we’d play: Zombie Attack. We’d pretend the world had been taken over by zombies, so we’d have to run and find shelter to escape from them. Sometimes we’d be down there for hours.
She was about six years old back then. I’m drawn to the river down there because I have some past-life experience with it, or some ancestors who traversed that segment of the river for the past 12,000 years. Or it was me in another life, walking up and down there. I sometimes feel that way about other places, too: Bandelier National Monument, Chaco Canyon, Mesa Verde. It feels like a blood memory—that’s the best way to describe it. And it wasn’t sudden; It accrued over time. One day, I was walking down there when Cricket ran up the river, and I had an epiphany that she had a connection to this place, and then I realized that I had a connection, too—to me as her daughter, or we were cousins. This relationship of our DNA to the river.
And I’m always attracted to the river, even when there’s no water in it. The sense of time and place, it’s a mile marker in time. Things come and go so fast, but the river’s always a constant. The river and the mountains—they’re constant. We as people are just visitors traveling through time.
My son and grandson have been going down there now, too. You get to be a little kid down there. It’s a whole other world. On the esoteric side, I like to take my G.I. Joes down there and pose them in the landscape. I have a G.I. Joe Mobile Unit, and I take a camera and set up scenarios of my G.I. Joes out there on patrol, searching for the Anasazi Mummy Bundle or chupacabras. It’s about seeking adventure. It brings me back to my little kid self.
Cochiti Pueblo ceramic artist Diego Romero is influenced by Mimbres designs, ancient Greek vessels, and comic books. See his work at Robert Nichols Gallery, 419 Canyon Rd., Santa Fe, (505) 982-2145,
www.robertnicholsgallery.com.
