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Shadow Reality

There is a kind of shadow reality in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

There is what one sees, if not really on the surface, then what we have been trained to see, something like the building here:  "Pueblo architecture!", we say.  "New Mexico!  I recognize it!"

But it is not even half what we see:  it is what is shadowed.  And what is shadowed is . . . yeah . . . how deep are those shadows?

Santa Fe is a kind of Fritz Scholder Indian.  It is what we see, and what is shadowed.  It is like saying that Santa Fe was founded in 1610.  "La Villa Real de las Santa Fe de San Franciso de Asis":  (the Royal Town of the Holy Faith of St. Francis of Assisi).  Except that there had been people living there--right there!--perhaps already for seven hundred years.  You can see them clearly in the shadows.

Mari and I had lunch in The Alley Cantina--formerly, El Patio, in nearby Taos, and were told that one of the kitchen walls entitled it to be the oldest building in Taos, at 400 years of age.  Except that we had just been to the pueblo outside of town.  People have been living there for nearly a thousand years.

Fritz Scholder, a most interesting and important American artist, spent some time in Santa Fe, producing a number of works, such as Santa Fe Indian #2 (here) that show two sides, two parts, two realities of Native American life.  One side is plain to see, the other is a shadow, something like what is publicly seen, and what is hidden and personal and culturally private.

Then Mari sent me a photo that brought all of that to mind.  It is of Jao and me, two years ago, about to hang a bird feeder.

There are shadow realities in that photo, too.  First, the Desert Southwest sun is evident; so evident that Mari, who took the picture, and who is behind the lens, is there--her shadow-self--as are Jao and I.

The old man, and the young boy, are two sides of a reality, also.  Neither of us is complete without the other.

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