On Friday morning we had breakfast at Pasqual’s Cafe. The wait was super long so we took a stroll to the basilica nearby.
I don’t know how I feel about this statue. On one hand, I appreciate the representation of a Native American woman, but on the other hand I am kind of distressed that she’s taken on the religion of her oppressors.
Then we were soooo ready to eat. The food at Pasqual’s was AMAZING.
After breakfast we drove up through Taos to the Taos Pueblo, which is a world heritage site. It has been continually inhabited for 1,000 years. It was so wonderful to explore and admire it with a sense of humility and respect for its inhabitants. In my Mormon days, I believed Native Americans were the descendants of Lamanites who lost their land because God punished them for wickedness. Up until 2010, the Book of Mormon described the Lamanites as “dark, filthy, and loathesome” people. If I had visited this pueblo during those days, I would have probably had the idea that I knew the true spiritual story of the people I was meeting, and that would have colored the way I viewed them. As it is, I was in awe of their kindness and resilience in the face of so much heartbreak, tragedy and oppression. And I found value in the way one of them described his spiritual tradition to me. It did not seem degraded at all, and in fact, because he was describing a connection to the earth, it struck me that much of what he was saying would exactly remedy the spiritual and environmental ills of today.
After the pueblo, we stopped by the church that Georgia O’Keefe painted.
Then we drove all the way to Carlsbad. On the way we passed through Roswell. All of the museums were closed, but there were still alien statues by the road, and those were fun for all of us to point out. We also saw some gorgeous scenery that we could not capture in photographs, but here are some attempts:
