Author: Kyle Hayes

  • The Most Basic Bread

    The Most Basic Bread

    (Flour. Salt. Yeast. Water. Nothing else.)

    Ingredients

    • 3 cups (375g) unfortified all-purpose or bread flour
    • 1 teaspoon fine sea salt
    • ½ teaspoon active dry yeast
    • 1¼ cups (300ml) warm water (around 105–110°F / 40°C)

    Instructions

    1. Mix the Basics
    2. In a large bowl, combine the flour, salt, and yeast. Pour in the warm water and stir with a spoon or your hands until it forms a shaggy, sticky dough. Don’t overthink it—just bring it together.
    3. Rest and Wait
    4. Cover the bowl with a damp cloth or plastic wrap. Let it sit at room temperature for 12–18 hours. Time is your secret ingredient here—patience transforms the dough into something alive.
    5. Shape and Rest Again
    6. When the dough has doubled in size and is dotted with bubbles, scrape it onto a floured surface. Gently fold it over a few times, shaping it into a round loaf. Place it on parchment paper or a lightly floured towel, cover again, and let it rest for 1–2 more hours.
    7. Preheat and Bake
    8. Place a heavy pot with a lid (like a Dutch oven) into your oven and preheat to 450°F (230°C). When hot, carefully place your dough inside, cover, and bake for 30 minutes. Remove the lid and bake for an additional 10–15 minutes, until the crust turns a deep golden brown and becomes hard.
    9. Cool and Remember
    10. Let it cool before slicing—if you can resist the temptation. The crust will crackle, the inside will steam. Tear off a piece, hold it warm in your hands, and remember that this is what survival tastes like.

    Notes

    • If you only have instant yeast, reduce to ¼ teaspoon.
    • Whole wheat or rye flour can replace up to one-third of the white flour for more depth.
    • The flavor deepens overnight, just like the memory of meals that once held families together.

    This bread doesn’t ask for luxury—just time, trust, and a little hunger to remind you what’s real.

    Resources for Hard Times

    If you’re looking for practical help, food support, or community resources, you can visit the Salt, Ink & Soul Resources Page.

    👉 Resources for Hard Times

  • A Gentle Return

    A Gentle Return

    Salt, Ink & Soul — Field Journal Series, Part III

    It was as if I’d never started. All my momentum gone — vanished like breath on glass. The old voice returned, whispering reasons to stay still.

    Why go? It asked. You can see everything on a screen.

    Going outside is what made you sick.

    Your car is too big. The police will stop you.

    Each thought a stone in my gut, each hesitation dressed as reason.

    Still, I drove — slow, deliberate, a man testing the edge of his own promise. The sun climbed high over Albuquerque as if to dare me. I turned off Montaño and followed the signs toward Pueblo Montaño Picnic Area, a place recommended by a co-worker. At first, it seemed I was never meant to find it, but I did, somehow.

    At the entrance, the first thing I saw was the carvings — towering guardians hewn from fallen trees. Birds poised mid-flight, turtles climbing, coyotes howling into the stillness. Their faces caught the morning light, wood polished by wind and time.

    For a moment, I thought about turning around. The same quiet panic pressed behind my ribs: You’ve seen enough. You can take a photo from the car. No one will know the difference.

    But something in the carvings — maybe the permanence of their stillness — silenced the argument. I stepped out.

    The path curved through low brush and cottonwoods, beginning to yellow with the season. The air was sharp with the scent of sage and sun-warmed dust. My body, still cautious from its revolt, protested at first — a cough, an ache, a slow complaint in the knees. But the further I walked, the more those protests dissolved into breath.

    At a small bench near a patch of golden brush, I stopped. The wood was warm. The wind moved like a whisper that had nothing to prove. From where I sat, I could see the Rio Grande glinting between the trees — quiet, relentless, alive.

    And for the first time in days, I didn’t feel like a man recovering. I felt like one returning.

    Progress may not come in the form of long drives or grand destinations. Maybe it’s just the act of standing outside yourself long enough to see where you are.

    The world isn’t waiting to be conquered — it’s waiting to be witnessed.

    As I turned back toward the car, the carvings seemed different. The bird looked less like it was guarding the trail and more like it was blessing the departure. The coyotes, once frozen in howls, now looked like they were calling me forward.

    Maybe that’s what growth really looks like — not grand adventures, but small acts of motion.

    What do you think… should I keep going?

    Kyle J. Hayes

    kylehayesblog.com

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  • The Body’s Revolt  

    The Body’s Revolt  

    Today, the rebellion didn’t come from outside. It rose in my own chest—cough first, then that raw-edged scrape across the throat, the slow ache that spreads like a rumor to joints and fingers. My body filed a complaint in every language it knew: fatigue, pressure, heat. It felt less like illness and more like a verdict. Maybe this is what happens when you dare the air to touch you after years of letting walls do the holding. Perhaps some older part of me—the cautious archivist, the keeper of soft corners—finally stood up and said, Sit down.

    I am home. Not the heroic threshold of a parking lot or a panoramic windshield, but the quiet geography of a kitchen table. The Green Tea with Lemon & Honey steeped too long. Honey pools at the rim of a jar like a promise I don’t believe in yet. A pile of tissues sag with the weight of their job. The notebook lies shut under the pen I’d placed there with good intentions, the cover warm from the light but stubborn in its silence. The window stays closed, the sunlight pressing its face against the glass—proof enough, I tell myself, that the air out there can’t be trusted. The room hums softly with my own confinement, the kind of silence that sounds like waiting for permission to move.

    This is not the scene we celebrate. No triumphant shot of road and horizon. No clean moral in which discomfort becomes courage becomes motion. Instead: the stall. The human stutter. The gulp of disappointment that tastes like metal and old plans. I keep waiting for the narrative to break in my favor, for the part where resolve conquers symptoms, where I lace up shoes and walk straight into the weather. But the boots sit obediently near the door, a small sermon on readiness I haven’t earned.

    It would be easier to call this a cold and let it pass without comment. But the body keeps secrets only when we ask it to. Today, mine is talkative. It says: You have learned to love the museum of control. Measured light, predictable temperature, the still life of comforts arranged just so. It says: Maybe cowardice is the name we give the tenderness we don’t yet know how to carry. That one stings. Not because it’s cruel, but because it might be true.

    I take a sip of tea and the heat climbs my throat, then lowers a rope into the hurt. I pretend that counts as bravery. I inventory the tools: steam, citrus, ginger, honey, patience. Each one is a small citizen in the fragile republic of the body. Each one is voting for me to stay. I listen for the old voice—Everything you need is here—and hear its new clause: …for now. There’s mercy in that ellipsis. There’s also a dare.

    People talk about transformation like it’s a door you stride through, a hinge that swings, a sky that opens. Sometimes it’s closer to the slow rotation of a dimmer switch. Sometimes change is a cough you stop resisting, a nap you refuse to shame, a page you agree to leave blank until your hands remember how to hold a line without shaking. I want to be the version of myself who chooses outside as a reflex, not as an achievement. Today I am not him. Today I am a person sitting at a table, watching light lose its patience across the floorboards, trying not to mistake stillness for surrender.

    There’s a particular disappointment that comes from failing your own promise. It arrives with the officiousness of a hall monitor: Weren’t you the one who said— Yes. I was. I am. I will be again. But today the body votes no, and the mind—traitor or guardian, I can’t tell—counts the ballots twice. That, too, is information. Maybe growth isn’t the victory lap; maybe it’s the audit.

    I catch myself reaching for explanations —little alibis to hand the reader on my way past: allergies, the season, the stress that’s stacked up, and finally, asking for rent. But the truth is plainer. Stepping into the world costs something, and my pockets are light today. The shame isn’t that I don’t have the fare; it’s that I keep checking the same empty pockets and pretending I’m surprised.

    So this is what I can offer: witness. The ordinary, unbeautiful courage of not pretending. No conquest narrative, no panoramic proof. Just the still life of a day that didn’t go. Steam thinning above a cup. The honey’s slow gold. A pen that will write again when it’s ready and not a minute earlier. 

      Failure, I am learning, is a translator. It renders ambition into a tongue the body can understand. It says: You want to move? Then rest as if you mean it. It says: You want the world? Then take this room seriously. Practice gentleness here until your hands remember how to carry it outside. It says: Cowardice is a story; try another draft.

    If there’s a lesson in the ache—beyond fluids and sleep and the quiet arithmetic of recovery—it might be this: I don’t have to be the hero of my own day to be its honest historian. The page will forgive me for showing up without a conclusion. The sun, which has shifted now to the other end of the room, will rise again with or without my approval. Some mornings, it will find me on a trailhead with lungs like bright bells. Others, it will find me measuring ginger and watching dust fall through its light like notes on a staff.

    I look at the shoes by the door. I do not put them on. I look at the pen on the notebook. I do not force the line. I lift the cup and let the heat speak through me. The body is still lobbying its case. I am still listening. Between shame and mercy is a small table where I can sit for as long as it takes. The world will wait. The door is not going anywhere. Neither am I—until I am.

    Maybe tomorrow the hinge swings. Next week, the sky opens. Or I could learn to honor the days that don’t move, the ones that teach me how to carry silence without dropping it. If that sounds like cowardice to someone with stronger lungs, so be it. I know what it costs to breathe.

    When the tea is gone and the light snuffs itself along the baseboards, I open the notebook just enough to hear the paper sigh. No sentences come, but the page no longer feels like a closed fist. It feels like a palm.

    That will have to count for progress tonight. And if it doesn’t, I will learn to count differently.

    Kyle J. Hayes

    kylehayesblog.com

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  • Notes for the Road

    Notes for the Road

    Salt, Ink & Soul — Field Journal Series, Part II

    We’ve all heard the phrase, “I’m not as young as I used to be.”

    But for me, it’s never really been about age — it’s about gravity. The pull of places, the way life settles you down unless you fight to stay awake inside it. Some people live where they were born, their stories looping through familiar streets and steady skies. I’ve always lived apart — even when I was close, I was at the edge.

    People call it a wandering spirit.

    I prefer searching spirit. Wandering implies lostness. Searching carries intent — a hunger for something not yet found but deeply felt.

    The Pull

    When I first moved to Albuquerque, the desert had its own kind of whisper. The space between things felt wider here — room for thoughts to stretch, for silence to mean something. I learned about  Earthship homes — houses built from recycled materials, designed to sustain themselves off-grid and to live with the land rather than against it.

    It wasn’t just their design that intrigued me — it was their defiance. They refused permission. They were proof that you could live differently and still live beautifully.

    So I made the trip north.

    The Earthships

    The drive into Taos feels like crossing a threshold — sagebrush to sand, sky expanding until it seems to hum. Then, at the edge of nowhere, the Earthships appear like a dream half-finished — domed roofs, bottle walls shimmering in sunlight, glass catching sky.

    I took the tour slowly. Inside, the air felt calm, held. The walls glowed faintly green where glass bottles caught the light. Planters of herbs ran along windows, drinking sunlight and water collected from the rain. It was quiet — not empty, just balanced.

    The guide spoke about sustainability, but I was hearing something else — a kind of philosophy of living: build with what’s been discarded, make beauty out of survival. It reminded me that creation isn’t always new; sometimes it’s just rearranged endurance.

    “Exterior of Earthship home near Taos, New Mexico”
    exterior of earthship

      The Staircase

    From Taos, I drove south to Santa Fe, to the Loretto Chapel. I’d heard the story — the mysterious carpenter, the spiral staircase with no visible supports, built after the nuns prayed for a solution. Seeing it in person was something else.

    The staircase curves upward like a question that answers itself — no nails, no center post, just precision and faith. I stood beneath it, tracing the grain of the wood with my eyes, thinking about the people who build because they have to believe it will stand.

    Stairs said to be made by an Angel

      The Gorge

    Then there was the Rio Grande Gorge — where the land simply falls away.

    I parked, stepped out, and felt the wind announce itself. Heights and I have never been friends. I walked to the railing anyway.

    Below, the river glinted like a silver thread stitching through time. When a semi-truck passed, the bridge shuddered beneath my feet, and I gripped the rail tighter than I’d admit. But I stayed long enough to feel it — that strange marriage of fear and awe.

    breathtaking View
    View from the bridge

    That’s what this road was always about. Not conquering fear — just walking out far enough to meet it honestly.

    On the drive home, I realized I wasn’t chasing wonder anymore. I was studying it — seeing what remains when the awe fades and only understanding is left.

    Maybe the Earthship homes, the staircase, and the gorge were all saying the same thing:

    Build something that endures.

    Trust what you can’t see holding you.

    Look down, but don’t stay afraid.

    The road home was quieter. The car hummed its low prayer, tires counting miles of reflection. I thought about all I’d seen, and how every place had its lesson written in silence.

    Maybe I’m still searching, but it’s a better kind of searching now. Not for arrival — but for alignment. For the places and people that hold when the ground trembles.

    The road doesn’t always offer answers.

    Kyle J. Hayes

    kylehayesblog.com

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  • The Road Teaches Us to Listen

    The Road Teaches Us to Listen

    Salt, Ink & Soul — Field Journal Series, Part I

    The road begins long before you step onto it.

    For me, it starts with a small decision that never feels small: go. That’s the quiet contract I sign with myself in the dark—turn off the clock, get out of bed, make coffee even if the morning looks like a bad idea. Rain against the window, frost on the glass, wind leaning into the stucco—you go anyway. Jacket. Keys. A hand to the door, a muttered prayer that sounds like breath.

    Inside the car, I choose the season by touch. Heat in winter until my fingers thaw. Air in summer until the cabin stops tasting like sleep. The engine wakes with that low, devotional sound—humble, faithful, unglamorous. I sit with it a moment, letting my doubts burn off like fog on a warm hood. There’s always a reason to cancel. Fatigue. Weather. The long shadow of a mood I can’t name. The old lie that today isn’t the day.

    I have learned this much about myself: the early stops are the trap. You pause for a snack you don’t need, a second coffee you’re already holding, and suddenly the road becomes optional. Detours multiply. The invisible hand is never dramatic—it taps your shoulder with errands and returns you safely to the couch. So I pass the first exit. I don’t look right or left. I’ve stocked the snacks, filled the tank, and told no one where I’m headed. Commitment looks like a car at speed. The on-ramp curves up like a question, then drops you into a lane where the only language is forward.

    The interstate is my point of no return. The lines gather under the car like stitches sewing me to the day. I breathe out—a slight relief that feels larger than it should. I did the hard part. I left. I find the playlist that knows my miles: songs that ride low and steady, not too eager, not too clever. Something with space in it. Enough room for the land to speak.

    This is where the road begins to teach, if you let it.

    It teaches patience first. Mile markers count like beads through your fingers. Semis pass with the dignity of whales. The horizon doesn’t arrive; it reveals. You become a witness to your own habits—how your chest loosens after the second exit, how your jaw unclenches when the first long stretch unfolds, how your shoulders drop when the radio fades to static. The world steals the choreography you keep trying to impose on it. You start to hear the hum—tires negotiating asphalt, crosswinds tuning the cabin to a note you can almost name, the slight rattle of a life you’ve packed in a hurry.

    It teaches with small mercies. A gas station clerk who calls you “love” without making it a performance. A church sign that gets the parable right by accident. A plastic bag snared on a fence, stubborn against the wind. The familiar ache of a diner mug against your palms. Eggs that taste better for the road it took to get there. The cook who doesn’t look up but understands precisely who you are: someone who left a house this morning to go looking for something they can’t carry back in both hands.

    It teaches with the kind of quiet that isn’t empty. Out here, silence has texture. It lives in the low whine of steel guardrails, in the dry grass that whispers even when there’s no breeze, in the pale blue that the sky saves for days like this. You roll the window down and the air meets you, honest—dust, oil, a memory of rain. Somewhere just beyond the shoulder, a hawk draws solemn circles in a column of heat and refuses to explain itself.

    The road talks in fragments and expects you to assemble meaning. A boarded-up motel where someone once honeymooned in good faith. A burial of sun-bleached crosses huddled on a ridge. A billboard sermon that works only because the sky won’t stop listening. Nothing arrives tidy. The point isn’t clarity. The point is attention.

    I used to believe you traveled to escape your life for a while. Now I think you travel to stop lying to it. Movement scrapes the varnish off your days. It replaces routine with exposure: the vulnerability of a stalled engine, the humility of a wrong turn, the grace of a stranger who points you toward a road you didn’t know you needed. Each mile asks a better question than the one before it. Who are you when nobody is asking for your performance? Who are you when the only thing to do is keep going?

    The farther I get from my usual noise, the more I understand the discipline of listening. I turn the music down until the speakers barely breathe. I count cattle guards without trying. I let the wind dictate when the window goes up or down. The road becomes a metronome for the part of me that won’t learn patience any other way. My foot steadies. My mind does not empty; it organizes. Old griefs get filed under new light. The never-ending list shortens, not because the tasks vanish, but because the road insists on proportion: you are small, and still held.

    By midday, the light changes its mind. Shadows shorten, and the heat decides what kind of day it wants to be. 

    I pull off onto a frontage road that minors in regret and majors in perspective. The surface is rough enough to earn respect. A low ridge rises, and I climb it on foot because the day asks and because sometimes the answer is yes, even when you don’t know the question. Up top, the wind has a cathedral voice. The land arranges itself into a map you can read with your tongue—dust, sun, iron, a little mercy. I don’t take a picture. I don’t say a word. I let the horizon do what it does best: decide nothing for me and change everything anyway.

    Back in the car, I don’t check the time. Time is a city tool. Out here, we measure by light—how it sharpens, how it softens, how it lifts off the hood like a thin leafing. I aim the nose toward home, not because I’m finished, but because finishing is not the point. The road has said what it needed to say: that listening is work, that attention is a sacrament, that the world is not waiting to be narrated so much as witnessed with a bit of respect.

    Near the interstate, the old instincts return. The exits appear like promises or temptations. The hand that tried to steer me back this morning is quieter now. It didn’t vanish; it lost its authority. I put the playlist away and let the tires do the singing. The lines pull me forward, not faster, just truer.

    I don’t come back with revelations big enough for billboards. I come back with small instructions written in dust: drink water; call your people; cook something simple; write a sentence that owes nothing to applause. The engine cools. The day lowers its shoulders. I sit a moment before going in, the car clicking as it forgets its heat.

    Maybe the road isn’t a way out so much as a way through. Maybe its gift is not destination but calibration—the chance to tune your own noise until you can hear the hum beneath everything, the one that was there before playlists and plans, the one that sounds like wind across open ground.

    Maybe the point was never to arrive.

    Maybe it was to finally listen.

    Kyle J. Hayes

    kylehayesblog.com

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  • The Invisible Hand and the Road Not Taken

    The Invisible Hand and the Road Not Taken

    I bought a vehicle that can go anywhere—mountains, mesas, the forgotten roads that stretch like veins across the desert. Yet somehow, I’ve gone nowhere. There’s an invisible hand that holds me in place, the same quiet force that makes stepping into a restaurant alone feel like walking into a storm. I need purpose, or company, or both, to push past it.

    Lately, though, the sky has been whispering louder than my fear. During the Balloon Fiesta, I watched people from every corner of the world stand in awe of the same morning light I’ve taken for granted. Strangers were out there feeling the beauty of this place—my place—while I stood behind my walls, waiting for permission to belong. That realization loosened the hand’s grip just enough for me to move.

    So I began small.

    Tiguex Park

    Tiguex Park isn’t large or loud. It’s one of those places that feels like an exhale—the kind of open green that reminds you the desert can still be gentle. Cottonwoods border its edges, their leaves whispering stories to anyone who’ll listen. The grass carries the echo of a thousand family picnics, soccer games, and lazy afternoons.

    I sat on a bench and listened. The wind carried the faint clang of church bells from San Felipe de Neri. A child laughed somewhere behind me; a dog barked once and then twice. The air smelled faintly of dust and Pinon Coffee from stores nearby. I could almost feel the heartbeat of Albuquerque pulsing under the soil—slow, steady, stubborn.

    For a few minutes, I wasn’t thinking about where I should be. I was simply here. And that was enough.

    Old Town

    When I left the park, I drifted toward Old Town, a place I wasn’t even sure I’d ever been. The streets were narrower than I expected, like they were designed to make people slow down and see. My vehicle felt too big for this kind of space, a metaphor I didn’t miss—how often have I felt too big, too loud, too something for the places I wanted to fit into?

    I found parking near a cluster of adobe buildings washed in warm earth tones and trimmed in turquoise. Every corner seemed alive with color: handwoven blankets, clay pottery, silver jewelry glinting in the sun. But the crowds pressed close, a river of bodies and voices that threatened to sweep me away. Anxiety whispered, You don’t belong here, and I believed it for a moment.

    Still, I stayed long enough to see what I needed to see. The history in the walls. The persistence of beauty. The courage of people who choose to create, to sell, to share, even when the world is watching. Eventually, the noise became too much, and my anxiety reminded me it was time to go. But as I left, I felt something else—I had gone.

    Sometimes that’s the victory: motion.

    Chile Addict

    Leaving Old Town, I wasn’t ready for home yet. I wanted something that spoke to the culture I had only brushed against. A museum? A gallery? Maybe food? I found all three at Chile Addict on Eubank.

    If passion had a smell, it would be chile. Inside, every inch of space was filled—ristras hanging from the ceiling like red jewelry, shelves lined with sauces from every corner of New Mexico, even dish towels embroidered with peppers in every shade of fire. I bought a bottle of Albuquerque Hot Sauce, labeled “Extra Hot.” I didn’t realize “extra” meant something different here—this was heat meant for native tongues, not transplants like me. But I loved that. It was honest. It burned like truth.

    There was something sacred in that store: the way it celebrated an ingredient that’s more than food—it’s memory, identity, inheritance. It reminded me that culture isn’t confined to museums or galleries. Sometimes it’s bottled, hanging, or simmering quietly in someone’s kitchen.

    What Comes Next

    Driving home, I thought about how long I’ve let that invisible hand dictate my movements. How many experiences have I let anxiety edit out before they began? This small journey—Tiguex Park, Old Town, Chile Addict—felt like a rebellion against that stillness.

    Maybe I should do this every week? Not for content or performance, but as a ritual of re-entry into life. To see my city not as a backdrop but as a living text—one I’ve been too afraid to read.

    Exploration doesn’t always begin on the open road. Sometimes it starts at the park down the street, or in the narrow lanes of a place you’ve always avoided. Sometimes the bravest thing you can do is just go.

    Maybe that’s what growth really looks like—not grand adventures, but small acts of motion. What do you think… Should I keep going?

    Kyle J. Hayes

    kylehayesblog.com

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  • The Quiet

    The Quiet

    Salt, Ink & Soul — Albuquerque Notes

    It’s not silence I’m afraid of.

    It’s what it asks me to notice.

    After the city winds down and the last porch light clicks off, a different gravity settles over Albuquerque. The air thins and sharpens. The clock doesn’t tick so much as announce—each second a footstep down an empty hall. Even the refrigerator hum sounds like a confession. Outside, the street goes soft: figures moving like ghosts, wind pushing fine dust into corners as if to whisper, look closer.

    In the kitchen at night, I stand there, unsure. Wanting to make something, not knowing if I’m even hungry. Under one dim bulb, a small pool of gold forms on the counter. Tile throws the light back in fragments—little squares of moon you can touch. The sink holds its breath. Somewhere above the cabinets, the house settles into itself, wood remembering the day it was a tree. The room is stocked—spices, onions, bones for broth—but hunger doesn’t arrive on command. The emptiness isn’t in the pantry. It lives somewhere between the throat and the hands.

    They say a writer’s greatest enemy is the blank page. They’re not wrong, but that’s not all. Emptiness has cousins: a cook’s dim kitchen when the body isn’t hungry; a road at midnight when the destination is gone and home hasn’t yet declared itself. The quiet asks for something you can’t measure—faith in a spark you cannot see.

    What does it mean to keep creating when the world around you—and inside you—goes still? What do you do when the excitements of special events are gone?

    There’s a restlessness inside the calm, like ducks on a pond—serene on the surface, paddling like hell beneath. After the community’s noise, the quiet feels heavier than the rest. It carries expectation without applause, work without witnesses. You can hold peace and pressure at once: the relief of not performing, the terror that maybe the next sentence, the next meal, won’t arrive.

    So I walk the rooms, listen to the house breathe, look out at adobe walls silvered by the moon, at porch lights fluttering like low-altitude stars. In this desert city, quiet isn’t absence—it’s landscape. Wind hums in the eaves. A lone car slips past, tires whispering secrets to the asphalt. Somewhere, behind a thin wall, soft laughter breaks and fades—the way a match surrenders after doing its job.

    If I cook, I begin with what listens back: onion, oil, salt, low flame. I don’t chase a masterpiece; I court a whisper. Heat slowly, until the room remembers its purpose. If I write, I let the hands move before the story arrives—detail by detail: the scrape of chair legs, the nick on the cutting board shaped like a small country, the clock insisting it is the only drummer left. I ask the night to tell me what it knows that daylight talks over.

    Quiet becomes a compass if you let it. It points not north but inward. It wants fewer clever sentences and more honest ones. It returns me to the first question: Who taught you to make something from almost nothing? Who fed you when there wasn’t much to eat? What did their hands look like under this same small bulb?

    I used to treat stillness like a problem to solve. I believed I should always be doing something—don’t waste time. Now I try to honor it as part of the work. The pause isn’t an intermission between lives; it’s the dark soil where the next season’s roots grow. It’s where endurance gathers; where healing grows legs.

    So I keep the rituals small and faithful. I leave a clean spoon on the counter. I set a glass of water by the notebook. I promise myself ten minutes of heat—words or stove, I don’t care which—then I let the ember decide. Some nights it becomes soup for nobody but me. Some nights it becomes a paragraph that holds after morning. The work is quiet, and it is enough.

    Outside, the Sandias keep their shape against deeper blue—mountain patience refusing to be hurried. Inside, the kitchen bulb halos the room like a blessing I didn’t think I’d earned. The page accepts a first line. The pan agrees with the first hiss. The world does not erupt in applause. It doesn’t need to.

    The fire worth trusting now is the low one—the barely visible ring that keeps the pot honest; the internal pilot light that refuses extinction. Creation isn’t the thunder of a finale; it’s the stubborn heat that stays when the audience goes home.

    The quiet isn’t asking me to fill it—only to listen long enough to remember why I speak.

    Kyle J. Hayes

    kylehayesblog.com

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  • Where the Fire Lives Now

    Where the Fire Lives Now

    Salt, Ink, & Soul — Albuquerque Notes

    So what now?

    The mornings feel sharper. The kind of air that bites before it kisses. The city exhales from weeks of color and noise, and what’s left is us — the ones who stay when the cameras leave. The ones who know the rhythm of this place when it’s quiet, when the wind has room to think again. Albuquerque becomes smaller in these weeks, but in a way that feels true. The traffic slows. The conversations drift toward what’s next: the cold, the holidays, the bills that never rest.

    It’s a different kind of work now.

    We pull coats from closets and test the heater before sunrise. We sweep the porch, watch the last leaves blow down Central, and start talking about green chile stew the way other cities talk about snow. The vendors pack away their tents. The small diners on Lomas fill again with regulars who know the servers by name. It’s quieter — but not empty. Just changed.

    Everywhere you look, people are preparing. For the cold. For the gatherings. For the weight of the months that close a year. The woman at the laundromat folds blankets that smell faintly of cedar. A man in line at Albertsons mutters about the cost of food. Someone carries a bag of tamales wrapped in a towel to keep them warm. In this city, even small talk turns to survival — not in the desperate sense, but the sacred one. How to endure. How to soften the edges of a hard season.

    That may be where the fire lives now, not in the spectacle or the season’s headline, but in the quiet gestures that keep life lit. The pan was warming on the stove before dawn. The neighbor is checking on an elder before the cold snap. The smell of roasted chile still lingering in backyards is proof that something good happened here and will again. The city glows from within, not above.

    Albuquerque people are built for this. For the ebb between celebration and solitude. For the ordinary days that still ask for presence. The heat of chile, the hum of space heaters, the scratch of ristras hanging against stucco walls — these are our small flames. We feed them daily, without thinking, and call it living.

    Outside, the Sandias sit there, massive yet intimate, like an old friend you’re used to ignoring until the seasons remind you she’s still here. The river runs thin but steady. Somewhere, a child’s jacket zipper sticks, and a parent sighs with the patience of love. It’s all so ordinary — and maybe that’s the point. The fire doesn’t need to be loud to mean something.

    The city keeps moving, slower now, softer. We return to work, to families, to whatever version of hope we can hold through December. The light fades earlier, but it carries a particular mercy with it — the permission to rest, to reflect, to begin again quietly.

    Where the fire lives now is in us — in every New Mexican who stays when the noise dies down. In the ones who keep the coffee warm, who open the shop before dawn, who find beauty in a simple meal shared under a cold sky. The spectacle was never the point. The people were.

    Kyle J. Hayes

    kylehayesblog.com

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  • The First Meal After the Fiesta

    The First Meal After the Fiesta

    On cold fronts, memory, and a bowl of green chile chicken soup

    The end of the Balloon Fiesta carries a silence you can taste. The burners dim, the silhouettes fold, and the field turns back into earth. Vendors pack away their sugar and smoke. Children in fleece hats tug at sleeves, still seeing balloons in the corner of their eyes. For days, we’ve lived by flame and lift, the city strung between propane thunder and the hush that follows. But when the sky empties, another truth arrives—the one I pretend not to notice until I feel it creep beneath the door: the cold is coming.

    Cold has its own clock. It doesn’t show up with a shouted announcement; it settles in the way light changes, the way cottonwood leaves rattle like tiny bones, the way you reach for a heavier blanket without thinking. The air takes on a metallic taste of first frost. Someone you love says, “hot chocolate?” and you both hear the unspoken word tucked behind it—home.

    Cold, for me, also means a summons to the kitchen. Not the glossy kind with copper pots and exacting vocabulary, but the honest room where you stand in your socks and let breath fog the window. It’s the season of dishes that do more than warm you. Some fight colds; some fight loneliness; some fight the old story that you have to carry this winter by yourself. They’re the soups and stews you make because the answer to wind against glass is heat you can hold in both hands.

    My winter has always begun with chicken soup. Not the postcard version with perfect coins of carrot and noodles set like train tracks, not even the kind anchored by rice. Chicken and vegetables—that’s what I knew. We were too broke to make it from scratch. We had cans, and when we moved up in the world to name brand, I felt like we’d crossed into a secret country. That red-and-white label was royal. I’d watch it burp into the pot in one heavy ring, smell the thin broth turn obedient under the coil burner, and think: What could be better than this?

    Later came food shows and glossy knives, the promise that technique could turn a life. I tried noodles. I tried rice. I tried the whole geography of starch. I learned to sweat onions until they are sweet and glassy, to coax flavor from bones, to salt early rather than late. I knew the swagger of stock that whispers from the next room before you taste it. I learned that cooking is a ledger of small decisions, and that poverty teaches you something chefs can’t: make do until make do turns into this is mine.

    But the most important lesson came from this place I call home. New Mexico has a way of editing your palate. You can live here long enough and discover that your mouth has a memory separate from your mind. The wind smells like roasting chile in the fall, and you salivate like a bell’s been rung. Someone says, “Christmas or red?”—it’s not a question so much as a doorway. If I were going to keep chicken soup as my winter prayer, I had to tell the truth of where I lived. The answer wasn’t noodles or rice. It was what the land keeps teaching: heat is not just temperature; heat is story.

    So I started folding green chile into the pot.

    At first, I was cautious, like meeting a new neighbor on the sidewalk—polite nods, measured conversation, and an exit plan. But Chile does what honest neighbors do: it shows up with a casserole and asks about your people. It doesn’t simply add spice; it adds clarity. The broth stands a little straighter. The vegetables stop playing in the background. Chicken remembers it used to be a living thing and offers you something back—protein and humility. The whole bowl finds its voice.

    And yet, I’ll confess: I made it mild. I told myself I was being considerate of guests, or cautious of colds, or faithful to my childhood memory. Truth is, I was worried about changing the soup I’d used as a map out of boyhood. I didn’t want to betray the tinny comfort of cans we could barely afford, or the later triumph of stepping up to Campbell’s. But a place will tell you when you’re hedging. The longer I lived here, the more I wanted the bowl to match the sky. The sunsets are not shy. The mountains do not whisper. Why should the soup?

    I need it spicier now.

    Not recklessly hot; not pain for performance. I’m talking about the warmth that starts in the throat and blooms behind the sternum like a lantern. Heat that doesn’t drown the other notes but conducts them, the way a good conductor doesn’t overpower an orchestra—just raises a hand and brings brass, strings, woodwinds into a single breath. I want a bowl that can meet the first real wind of winter at the door and say, kindly, not today.

    The strange gift of getting older is realizing that comfort and challenge aren’t enemies. The same bowl that holds your hands steady can also invite you forward. Green chile does that to me. It keeps the humble truth of chicken soup—one bird, a few vegetables, a pot, patience—while insisting on place and present tense. It says: This is New Mexico, and you live here now. It says: memory is better with light.

    That’s why I like making it after the Fiesta. The week is a public exhale. The city has been up early, shoulder to shoulder with strangers, heads tilted back until necks ache—faith expressed as attention. We return home with digital evidence that wonder still exists, then wake up to leaf blowers, coffee, and a fridge that needs a plan. The world becomes regular again. You could call that a comedown. I call it a kitchen.

    I set a pot on the stove. The onions hit oil and give up their sweetness. Bell pepper follows. Turkey sausage crumbles and browns. The room starts to smell like we’re going to make it. I add broth, the kind that listens when it boils. The chicken goes in—shredded, humble, sure. And then the green chile. The pot takes a small, ceremonial breath. It becomes a place.

    There’s no need for noodles. No need for rice. I thought I needed them for ballast, for respectability, for proof. Turns out I wanted space—room for pepper and onion to have their say, room for chile to tell me that winter is not a punishment but a way of paying attention. A bowl without ballast can still carry you, if you trust the hands that hold it.

    When it’s done, I taste for salt and let a little cheese drift in at the end. Sometimes I whisk an egg and pour it slowly, like a soft snowfall meeting steam. I stand by the stove in my sock feet with the window fogged and the mountains beginning their evening trick of becoming larger while pretending to recede. I think of canned soup and coil burners, of the day the label meant we’d made it, of the shows that taught me vocabulary for feelings I already had. I think of how love sneaks into your life disguised as minor improvements: a better pot, a sharper knife, a chile that bites and then forgives.

    Outside, the cold is practicing its scales. Inside, the spoon finds the bottom of the bowl and returns with proof. This is how we winter where I live now: not by refusing the season but by seasoning our refusal to quit. The Fiesta will return. The sky will bloom again. Between now and then, we’ll build our own heat—quiet, steady, shared.

    If you ask me what I’d change about my soup, I’ll say the same thing I want for the coming months: a little more fire. Not to scorch. To clarify. To remind me that comfort can have a backbone, and that home, at its best, is a place that warms you and wakes you up.

    The cold is coming. Good. I’ve got a pot on.

    ➤ Read the recipe: Keto Green Chile Chicken Soup →

    A bowl of warmth, reflection, and the quiet work of the soul.

    Kyle J. Hayes

    kylehayesblog.com

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  • When the Sky Empties: Remembering the Ground We Stand On

    When the Sky Empties: Remembering the Ground We Stand On

    When the last balloon disappears beyond the Sandias and the roar of burners fades into quiet, the city feels different. The sky, so alive just yesterday, now stretches bare and endless — as if catching its breath after carrying so much wonder. The fields that once pulsed with color and laughter have returned to stillness, the smell of dust and fried dough lingering in the cool morning air. Vendors pack their tents, families drive home, and the wind takes its time moving through what’s left — paper cups, flattened grass, and the memory of joy.

    I live here in Albuquerque, where Native American culture isn’t a festival you visit — it’s a pulse that moves through every day. You see it in the food — fry bread sizzling beside green chile stew — in the jewelry stands where turquoise catches sunlight like captured sky, and in the murals where ancestors watch from painted adobe walls. You hear it in languages that exist nowhere else, carried in song and conversation. This is the place where the Gathering of Nations fills the air each spring, where drums thunder and dancers move like prayers made visible — a spotlight on cultures that never stopped burning, even when the world looked away.

    So when Indigenous Peoples’ Day arrives, it doesn’t feel like an isolated moment — it feels like recognition of what’s always been. It’s a day that reminds us this land isn’t borrowed or bought; it’s lived in, sung to, and remembered. It honors those who first called these mesas home, who understood the sacredness of the earth beneath their feet long before any balloon lifted toward the sky.

    The irony isn’t lost on me — how one day we fill the heavens with color, and the next we honor those who’ve always found meaning in the ground. Maybe that’s the lesson of this timing: that flight and foundation were never intended to be separate things. The balloons rise because the land allows them to. The beauty of the sky depends on the reverence of the soil.

    Standing in the empty field, I feel both awe and humility. The footprints, the dust, the faint hum of the Rio Grande nearby — it all feels alive, like the land is reminding us that celebration doesn’t end when the sky clears. It just changes form.

    Maybe the trick isn’t to choose between the two — not flight or foundation — but to remember that we rise best when we know what we’re rising from.

    As the sun warms the quiet city, I watch one last balloon drifting alone, far to the east — small, defiant, and free. And I think of next year, when the sky will once again bloom with color, and the land will hold us steady beneath it all.

    Because here, in Albuquerque, both sky and soil have stories. And we honor them best when we remember we belong to both.

    Kyle J. Hayes

    kylehayesblog.com

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