Tag: community

  • “Questions for the Future”

    “Questions for the Future”

    There’s a kind of fear that doesn’t arrive all at once. It doesn’t kick down the door. It seeps in, like humidity through cracked paint or smoke through the seams of a closed window. The kind that makes a home in your chest, building slowly and silently. That’s the kind of fear I’ve had about writing.

    Because writing—real writing—isn’t just performance. It’s not what you show them. It’s what leaks out in the spaces you don’t control. In the metaphors you didn’t mean to use. The slip of a memory. The softness in a sentence when you swore you were being strong. That’s the terror. That somehow, on a blank page, people will see you—unasked, unfiltered, unprepared.

    And I’ve been dodging that kind of exposure for a long time.

      You grow up learning to hide parts of yourself. In some neighborhoods, vulnerability is just another way to get hit—emotionally, spiritually, or with something less metaphorical. So you learn. You get good at it. You make armor out of silence and humor out of pain. You laugh loud enough to drown out the parts of yourself you don’t want heard.

      For me, it started early—ridiculed for being soft. For caring. For feeling things too deeply. Every time I let something slip, there was a consequence. Sometimes it was teasing. Sometimes it was loneliness. Over time, the message became clear: protect yourself.

    So I did. I built walls with intention. Not just to keep people out, but to keep something in—me.

      Lately, though, I’ve started letting people in. Not the whole crowd. Just a few. Just enough. You find someone you trust—maybe a friend who knows the shape of your silence—and you let them see a little more. A crack. A draft of warmth. Not a storm.

    But still, I worry.

      Because once the dam is broken, who controls the flood?

    That’s the thing about pain: it’s obedient until it isn’t.

    So I let it out in trickles. A sentence here. A sigh there. I’ve convinced myself that’s safer. That if the moment goes sideways, I can slam the valve shut and pretend like I never said anything at all.

    I’m curious if that’s preservation or cowardice. Or both.

      Sometimes, the isolation feels like a weighted blanket that won’t get off my chest. You carry the weight of your untold stories like overdue bills, knowing the interest is accumulating. You pretend you’re just private. But privacy, in excess, becomes starvation.

    You tell yourself you’re protecting yourself—but at what cost?

    When no one knows your whole name, who will mourn you properly?

      That’s the mess of it. Writing—this act of storytelling—isn’t always about catharsis. Sometimes it’s confrontation. Sometimes it’s putting a mirror to your own face and realizing you’ve spent years looking away. The stories we don’t tell are often the ones we most need to understand.

    I write now not because I want to be known, but because I’m starting to believe that parts of me are worth knowing.

    And if someone out there reads this and recognizes their own mask, their own silence, their own slow-burning rage and resignation—maybe we’ve both done something that matters.

      I don’t have answers. Just questions for the future.

    What happens when you open too much?

    What happens when you never open at all?

    Maybe the trick isn’t to dam the flood or drown in it—maybe it’s to learn to wade.

    Even if it means revealing that you bleed just like everyone else.

    Kyle J. Hayes

    kylehayesblog.com

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    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 Love Letter to Potlucks, Church Basements, and Aluminum Trays

    A Love Letter to Potlucks, Church Basements, and Aluminum Trays

    Salt, Ink & Soul — Humanity Through Food Series

    There’s a special kind of magic that happens when a community decides—quietly, without fuss—that everyone needs to be fed.

    Not in some grand, official sense.

    Not with grants or committees or agendas.

    Just fed.

    Fed the old-fashioned way:

    On a folding table in a warm room that smells like memory, grief, pride, and somebody’s auntie’s best Fried Chicken.

    I’ve always had a soft spot for potlucks. Maybe it’s because people bring their best selves to those tables—literally. Every dish arrives covered in foil and hope, carried by someone who has spent the whole morning stirring and tasting and adjusting because they wanted to show what they could do. Not to brag. But to share.

    A potluck is a quiet confession:

    This is the dish I trust to speak for me.

    And there’s something beautiful about the way people place their food on the table and then pretend not to watch. They hover from a distance—not out of ego, but out of longing. Waiting for that smile. That small nod. That moment when someone tastes their dish and closes their eyes, just for a heartbeat, because something familiar touched them.

    You can’t buy that moment.

    You can only feed it.

    Church basements have their own flavor of truth.

    The ceilings are low. The chairs wobble. The lighting flickers. But none of that matters, because the food—the real food—is honest. Greens cooked down until they surrendered. Cakes that lean to the left but taste like heaven. Macaroni and cheese that could heal almost anything.

    People don’t come to impress in those spaces.

    They come to belong.

    They come to be held by the warmth of a room that has seen everything: baptisms, funerals, heartbreak, and survival. And in every season of life, the table stays set.

    Long before the world used terms like mutual aid, this was it.

    This was the safety net.

    This was how communities kept each other alive.

    No one asked, “What can I bring?”

    They asked, “Who needs to eat?”

    And somehow the table always balanced itself—one person bringing meat, another bringing bread, someone else bringing something sweet, and a few saints making sure the greens showed up so the ancestors wouldn’t fuss.

    It wasn’t organized.

    It was instinctual.

    Care doesn’t need a sign-up sheet.

    It just needs a kitchen.

    I think about those aluminum trays—the ones that bend if you hold them wrong. They don’t look like much, but they’ve carried entire histories. Weddings. Funerals. Reunions. Wednesday nights where people just needed a reason not to be alone.

    Aluminum trays are our generation’s scarred cast-iron skillets: humble, overlooked, essential.

    And they remind me of something I fear we’re losing in our digital, curated world:

    We were feeding each other long before we were performing for each other.

    A potluck isn’t content.

    It’s a community.

    It’s generosity without ceremony.

    It’s survival disguised as Sunday comfort.

    That’s probably why I love them so much.

    Because in a culture obsessed with individualism, a potluck is a rebellion.

    It says: We do this together.

    It says: Come as you are, and bring whatever you can.

    It says: There is room for you at this table, even if life hasn’t been kind, even if you feel small, even if all you could manage today was paper plates.

    Food has always been the language that makes room for the parts of us we don’t know how to name.

    So here’s my love letter—

    to the potlucks, the church basements, the community centers, the too-small living rooms, the aluminum trays carried in trembling hands.

    To the people who show up with their best dishes and their quiet hopes.

    To those who feed others before feeding themselves.

    To the tables that held us long before we had the words for what we were carrying.

    May we never forget how to gather like this.

    May we always remember that survival was never meant to be a solo act.

    And may we keep spreading these tables—wherever we can, with whatever we have—so no one has to face the world hungry, unseen, or alone.

    Kyle J. Hayes

    kylehayesblog.com

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    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

  • 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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  • 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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  • The People Who Make the Sky Possible

    The People Who Make the Sky Possible

      We always start with the balloons. It’s hard not to; those floating colors command the horizon, pulling the eye upward until you forget your neck is sore. We discuss the chase trucks, their history, and the roots of flight in France and its rebirth in the soil of New Mexico. We speak of mass ascensions and Dawn Patrol, of Darth Vader and cows and hearts suspended against the dawn. But beneath all of it—the fabric, the burners, the photographs—is something more ordinary, and maybe more sacred: the people.

    Not just the pilots, not just the crews. The others.

    The volunteers, for instance, who rise earlier than even the birds, long before the sun thinks of climbing over the Sandias. They are there in the half-dark, directing traffic, holding ropes, keeping the rhythm of a ritual that looks effortless only because someone else made it so. They do this not for glory or paychecks, but because something within them decided that one week in October was worth sacrificing their sleep and time to help thousands of strangers feel wonder. They are the kind of people who disappear into the background, allowing the balloons to dominate the frame. And yet without them, there is no frame at all.

    Then there are the vendors. Their labor is not spectacle—it is fuel. They stand in lines of steam and scent, ladling out hot coffee, burritos, and sweet pastries to crews, balloonists, and wide-eyed tourists who arrive before dawn. They are there in the cold, their hands working the heat of the griddle while we marvel at the heat of the burners. They remind us that even awe requires calories. That memory is easier to hold when your fingers are warm against a paper cup.

    But the Fiesta isn’t confined to the field. For nine days, Albuquerque becomes a host. Visitors don’t only look up; they wander sideways. They move through Old Town’s adobe walls, tracing steps along Route 66, ducking into shops where turquoise glints under fluorescent light. They pause to listen to a drumbeat in a plaza, to hear the echoes of Native voices that remind them this land has been witness to centuries before balloons ever grazed its skies. They sit in diners and brewpubs, ask about “red or green,” and learn the shorthand of a state where chile is not just food but language, not just spice but identity.

    That’s what we forget when we reduce the Fiesta to balloons alone: it is not just a celebration of flight. It is a celebration of place. A city, a state, a culture flinging its doors wide and saying Come see us, come taste us, come know us. For nine days, New Mexico is not an afterthought on a map but the center of the world’s gaze. People arrive from Japan, Brazil, Wisconsin, Bristol, China, and Kenya. They stand shoulder to shoulder with locals, their accents colliding over green chile stew. And when they return home, they carry with them more than pictures of balloons—they carry New Mexico itself: the food, the hospitality, the community that rose as surely as the balloons did.

    I think about this often: balloons drift. They rise, they scatter, they vanish into the horizon. Their beauty is in their impermanence. But the people—the ones who cook, who sell, who welcome—are the tether. They keep the Fiesta from being only about what escapes into the sky. They anchor it in the soil, in red earth and chile smoke, in the hands that hand you coffee at dawn.

    Nine days in October. That’s what it is. Nine days when the world’s compass needle swings toward New Mexico, and all those who live here become part of something larger than themselves. Not by flying, but by feeding, guiding, welcoming, and reminding. The sky may belong to the balloons. But the heart of the Fiesta—always, inevitably—belongs to the people.

    By Kyle J. Hayes

    kylehayesblog.com

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