  Night before last I dreamt we were in our Earthship at urlLink Greater World . That night, before I went to bed, I had sat in front of my desktop wallpaper--a panoramic picture we took last October from the porch of the Harris Earthship.
The photo shows just a portion of the gorgeous view that sweeps across the highland plateau, eerily masking the Rio Grande Gorge, and is crowned by Taos Mountain in the foreground, and Wheeler Peak behind. When you look at this picture on my 17-inch iMac's screen, you can almost fool your brain into believing you're looking out a window. And so my brain returned the favor by almost fooling me into believing I was in my very own Earthship, just for a night.
It was a sweet gift. Yesterday was such a hard day for us, John with work and me without it, at the day's end we sat huddled on the couch listening to the children sleep and recovering our stronghold on sanity. We both felt it, I'm so glad John said it first. He was homesick. I confessed I'd been hoping his travel wouldn't be approved and he laughed in relief. We decided to scrap Russia and spend our resources on going back home to northern New Mexico more frequently. Moscow would have been fantastic, and I love traveling abroad with the children. But there's only one place in the world that I recharge, and I'm so empty that I'm running on fumes. Just making the decision made the world feel lighter. This morning John played urlLink KTAO as we dressed the kids and he cooked.
We all put on sweaters and carried thermal mugs and a bag of breakfast burritos over to Memorial so we could pretend we were watching urlLink the Balloon Fiesta instead of the Rodeo Parade. I tried to put out of my mind the smell of horse shit, the abundant Texas flags, and the obvious racial segregation (all of the 200+ African American riders were put together at the trailride's end, instead of interspersed throughout), and instead focus on believing I was watching the most beautiful spectacle eyes can view as balloons rise above the Sangre de Cristos on a crisp mountain fall morning. 
