Tag: community

  • 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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