Tag: life

  • 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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  • The Sky After the Fire

    The Sky After the Fire

      There’s a stillness that settles in the air when something beautiful begins to end.

    You can almost feel it—like the warmth that lingers after a fire dies down, or the echo that hangs in the air long after the music stops.

    That’s what Albuquerque feels like tonight.

    The Balloon Fiesta is winding toward its final days. The crowds are still here, the balloons will still rise, but there’s a quiet awareness—something in the way people talk, the way they linger at the park gates a little longer, or look up just a bit differently, knowing that soon the sky will be empty again.

    By Sunday, the burners will hiss one last time. The night glow will fade into memory, the food stalls will close, and the field will return to stillness. But for now, we are in that sacred in-between—the pause before goodbye.

    I think back to how it all started.

    The first flames in France—men daring the sky with nothing but fire, silk, and faith. That was the beginning of this story, the first breath of what would become centuries of wonder. Then came the dawn patrols—those early risers who carried hope into the dark, proving that courage often burns brightest before sunrise. And then, the chase—crews and families and strangers all following what cannot be caught, learning that beauty was never meant to be possessed, only witnessed.

    And now, here we are, standing at the edge of it all—at the night glow, where the sky turns into a mirror for our longing.

    If you’ve never stood there, it’s hard to explain. Balloons tethered to the ground, illuminated from within, flickering to life like lanterns in the desert. The sound of burners—deep, thunderous breaths breaking the cool air. Families sitting together, children wrapped in blankets, their faces bathed in orange light. The laughter, the awe, the warmth—it’s all there, suspended for a few hours in the thin October air.

    I’ve stood among them, camera in hand, burrito and coffee long gone cold, watching as the sky became a living painting. It’s strange how something as simple as hot air and fabric can stir something so deep. Maybe it’s the fire—how it connects us back to something ancient, something communal. Long before we had cities or machines, people gathered in the dark, their faces lit by flames, sharing warmth and stories.

    That’s what the night glow feels like—an echo of the first fires that made us human.

    Somewhere between the bursts of flame and the cheers of the crowd, I found myself thinking of next year. That’s the quiet magic of the Fiesta—it always leaves you wanting more, not in greed, but in gratitude. It doesn’t end so much as it plants something in you, a small spark that waits all year for October to return.

    By Sunday night, the last balloons will glow against the dark, one final dance between fire and air. The crowd will cheer, children will wave goodbye, and the sky will go black again. But everyone who’s been here will carry a piece of it home—the sound, the color, the feeling of standing still in a world that, for a few fleeting days, felt united in wonder.

    I think about the first fire in France and how they must have felt as they watched their creation lift into the air, untethered. I think about the dawn pilots who rise before light, guided by faith in the unseen. I think about the chasers who follow, knowing the joy is in the pursuit, not the catch. And I realize that each of us here—spectator or pilot, child or elder—is a part of that same story.

    We rise.

    We drift.

    We land.

    And somewhere between those moments, we learn what it means to live.

    So yes, the Fiesta is nearing its end, but endings are just quiet beginnings waiting for their turn. The fire will go out. The balloons will rest. But next October, when the air turns crisp again and the Sandias blush pink at dawn, we’ll all return.

    Because the sky after the fire isn’t empty.

    It’s waiting.

    And so are we.

    Kyle J. Hayes

    kylehayesblog.com

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  • The Children of the Fiesta

    The Children of the Fiesta

    There’s something sacred about growing up beneath a sky that remembers.

    Every October, as the desert air thins and the mornings turn cold enough to see your breath, a new generation of children is carried—still half-asleep—into the breaking dawn of the Albuquerque Balloon Fiesta. They come wrapped in blankets, wearing oversized beanies that slip down over their eyes, perched on their fathers’ shoulders, or tucked into strollers like small explorers in a world that hasn’t yet decided whether it’s dream or daybreak.

    They don’t know yet what they’re seeing. Not really. They just know the sound—the low thunder of burners roaring to life. The smell—dust, coffee, roasted chiles, and earth waking up. And then the color—balloons swelling and lifting into the soft blue light, hundreds of them, each a slow-moving miracle that drifts into their memory long before they know to call it that.

    To be born here, in this place, is to inherit the ritual. Every October, you wake early and drive into the crowd. You grow used to the sight of strangers sharing cocoa and cameras, to the soft murmur of awe when the first balloons glow against the dark, and to that one fleeting moment when the entire sky becomes a mosaic of light and patience. You grow up beneath those colors, and without realizing it, they paint the way you see the world—how you believe in beauty, how you trust in the possibility of flight.

    But not every child is born into this sky. Some grow up elsewhere—in places where the air smells of corn or sea salt, where October means harvests or hurricanes. And then one day, their parents tell them they’re going on a trip. They pack the car with snacks and stories, and they drive. They drive past the endless quilt of farmland, past fields that roll like green oceans, over mountains sharp enough to remind you that beauty often comes with a climb. And when the land changes—when the desert appears in its red-brown quiet, when the sky seems too large to name—they arrive here.

    And what they see can’t be translated. Words don’t hold it. You can describe the colors, the way the morning sun hits the fabric, or the hum of joy that passes through the crowd like shared breath. But to experience it—to feel it—is to understand something ancient. It’s to stand beneath hundreds of balloons rising at once and feel a small part of yourself rise, too.

    It’s not just a show. It’s a communion.

    Because what happens here every October isn’t only for tourists, pilots, or photographers who line up before dawn. It’s for the children—the ones watching wide-eyed from below. It’s for the ones who will grow up remembering how the world looked when it was still possible to believe in flight without fear. It’s for the ones who will one day bring their own children, explaining in half-whispers how it used to feel when they were young—the smell, the light, the sound of burners roaring like a heartbeat at the edge of morning.

    And somewhere in that cycle—between the past and the next generation—something timeless happens. The children who once looked up will become the parents pointing skyward. The memories that once belonged to them will become the inheritance they pass on. And each October, the desert will bloom again—not with flowers, but with fire and fabric and the shared wonder of people who refuse to forget what it means to look up.

    Because even as the world changes, even as screens replace stories and speed replaces stillness, there will always be this—this sky, this season, this reminder that we can still be humbled by color and air.

    The children of the Fiesta will grow up. They’ll go away, as children do. But the sky will call them back. And when they return—holding the hands of their own—they’ll realize what their parents knew:

    Some memories don’t fade.

    They lift.

    Kyle J. Hayes

    kylehayesblog.com

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  • The Sky Doesn’t Wait: Reflections from the First Weekend

    The Sky Doesn’t Wait: Reflections from the First Weekend

    The Balloon Fiesta has begun.

    The traffic is slow, the lines are long, and still—people come. They come from every corner of the city, from quiet neighborhoods and dusty pueblos, from out-of-state hotels and small-town motels. They come in flocks and families, in rental cars and pickup trucks, all heading toward that same expanse of sky.

    There’s something almost sacred about that patience—thousands of people inching forward, headlights cutting through the dark, chasing a sunrise that promises color and lift. When you finally reach the field, you feel the chill in the air and the hum of anticipation. It’s not just another event; it’s a pilgrimage.

      For me, it doesn’t feel real until I see him—Steve Stucker, the man who for decades became as much a part of the Fiesta as the balloons themselves.

    Even now, after retirement, the sight of him on-screen—covered in pins and smiling like he’s been greeting the dawn for a hundred years—makes it official: the Fiesta has arrived. His jacket tells its own story, each pin a memory, each one earned through years of showing up before dawn, rain or shine, to bring us the sky.

    In a world that changes so fast, there’s something steady in seeing a face that’s weathered every kind of morning—warm, biting, calm, or unkind. That’s what the Fiesta does: it pulls us together not just around balloons, but around continuity. Around the faces and names that remind us that we’ve been here before, and that we’ll come again.

    When the Wind Says “Not Today”

    This year, the wind won.

    The first mass ascension—canceled. But even that didn’t stop the people. They stayed. Walked the fields, drank coffee, ate breakfast burritos, told stories of years when the balloons had risen, and of mornings when they hadn’t. The disappointment didn’t linger long; it couldn’t.

    Because the Fiesta isn’t just about flight—it’s about the faith that flight will come again.

    Later that night, the “Glowdeo” filled the sky with candlestick burns—columns of flame roaring against the dark, balloons grounded but still alive, like sleeping giants stirring in their dreams. A drone show followed, lights moving in perfect symmetry—a new generation of flight, precision replacing intuition. I stood there wondering what comes next.

    Drones and Dreams

    The drones were beautiful. So were the balloons. But they spoke in different languages.

    The balloons moved like old souls—soft, human, uncertain. They relied on wind and patience. The drones moved like thought—fast, bright, efficient. Controlled. Predictable. One whispered of freedom, the other of order. Both were beautiful, and maybe both are necessary.

    Maybe this is what the Fiesta has become: a conversation between the past and the future, between the handmade and the programmed, between the art of drift and the science of control. The balloons remind us what it means to trust the air. The drones remind us what it means to master it.

    I watched both, side by side, and thought: maybe one day, they’ll find a way to share the same sky.

      Even without ascension, it felt right. People still looked up. Kids still pointed. Strangers still smiled. Coffee still steamed in paper cups, and laughter still carried across the cold morning air.

    That’s the quiet truth of this place—the Fiesta doesn’t need perfection to be beautiful. It needs people. It needs presence. It needs the shared belief that, for one week every year, Albuquerque becomes something greater than itself—a city suspended in wonder.

    And maybe that’s why we come back: not for the perfect flight, but for the reminder that even when the wind says “not today,” hope still fills the sky.

    Kyle J. Hayes

    kylehayesblog.com

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