Tag: reflection

  • A Veterans Day Reflection

    A Veterans Day Reflection

    Lately, this space has been about doing what I can — small things, quiet things. Writing about food that costs less but still feeds fully. Reminding people that hard times have come before, and somehow, we made it. Trying to turn memory into a map, so maybe others can find their way through their own lean seasons.

    But today, I want to turn that attention outward — toward a different kind of endurance. Toward a group of people who also know what it means to do what they can — and often, far more. The ones who gave years, limbs, sanity, and sometimes everything, in the name of something larger than themselves.

    We set aside a day for them — Veterans Day — meant to honor those who served this country and, in too many cases, came home carrying its invisible weight. We say “thank you for your service,” and we mean it, most of us. But I keep wondering if that’s all we’ve learned to say.

    You don’t have to look far to see the contradiction: a country that never stops telling itself that it leaves no one behind, and yet, at almost every intersection, you can see someone it did. Veterans sleeping under bridges. Holding cardboard signs. Waiting at food pantries. People who once trained to survive in the most hostile places on earth are now fighting to survive at home.

    Yes, there are programs. Yes, there are benefits. But if you’ve ever stood in line at the VA or talked to someone navigating that system, you know the difference between what exists and what works.

    I’m not here to offer solutions. I don’t have them. I don’t know how to fix the machinery of a government that can spend billions on war but seems to run out of compassion on the return trip. What I know are smaller things — human things. I know how to say thank you. I know how to feed someone. I know how to remember.

    And maybe that’s something, even if it isn’t enough.

    When I write about food, I’m really writing about survival — about how we keep going when everything feels stripped bare. And in a way, that’s what veterans know better than anyone. They know how to keep moving through the noise. How to turn discipline into a ritual. How to make meaning in the middle of chaos. They’ve done it for us, even when we didn’t deserve it.

    The stories I tell, about stretching enough to feed a family — they’re small, domestic wars of endurance. Theirs were louder, bloodier, lonelier. But the lesson is the same: survival costs something, and someone always pays.

    I think about the phrase “thank you for your service.”

    How tidy it sounds. How quick. It fits easily into conversation, into tweets, into holiday speeches. But behind that politeness are pieces of people scattered across decades — the ones who never came back, and the ones who did, but not completely.

    I don’t have parades or medals to give.

    I have words — small, imperfect ones, but offered with weight.

    To every man and woman who served — thank you. For your strength, your sacrifice, your impossible patience. For doing what many couldn’t or wouldn’t.

    And to those still fighting their own wars at home — for housing, for healthcare, for peace of mind — I see you. I don’t have answers, but I have recognition. I have gratitude. And I have the conviction that we can do more, that we must do more, for a country that still calls itself free.

    So today, I’ll do what I can — remember, write, feed whoever I can reach.

    Because service shouldn’t end when the war does.

    Kyle J. Hayes

    kylehayesblog.com

    Please like, comment, and share

    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

    Please like, comment, and share

  • 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

    Please like, comment, and share

  • 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

    Please like, comment, and share

  • 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

    Please like, comment, and share

  • 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

    Please like, comment, and share

  • “The Weight Beneath the Mask: On Patience, Rage, and the Quiet War for Empathy”

    “The Weight Beneath the Mask: On Patience, Rage, and the Quiet War for Empathy”

    Every morning, before the sun gets up and the world begins to call itself civilized again, I sit with myself. I try to be better than I was the day before. That’s the promise I’ve made, not to the world, but to the little boy I used to be—the one who deserved more tenderness than he received. The one who saw too much too early and still had the nerve to keep dreaming.

    I learn patience.

    I try to learn empathy.

    And most days, it feels like trying to catch rain in a sieve.

    Being a Foundational Black American in this country is to walk a tightrope stretched across a minefield. You must smile with your teeth clenched, laugh without humor, and nod when what you really want to do is roar.

    I try to treat everyone equally.

    That’s the goal, isn’t it? That’s the thing we’re taught to believe in. Equality. Fairness. The golden rule and the silver-tongued lies that follow it. But some days, it feels like I’m trying to hug a fist. Some days, the evidence of this country’s contempt for my existence is not anecdotal—it’s algorithmic. Baked into news cycles, comment sections, and the careful silence of the people who walk past injustice without blinking.

    You hear it. You feel it.

    There is discomfort in their voice when you speak with authority.

    The glance at your hands when you’re simply reaching for your ID.

    The way your masculinity is questioned when you don’t perform it on their terms, and criminalized when you do.

    Empathy feels dangerous some days.

    Softness feels like an invitation to be taken advantage of. And still, I reach for it. Not because I believe I’ll be met with it in return, but because I know what happens when you let anger do all the talking. You lose the part of yourself that still believes in healing.

    But let me say this plainly, because it needs to be said:

    Empathy is not weakness.

    It is resistance in its most refined form. It is the choice to keep your humanity intact when the world insists on stripping it from you.

    Still, I struggle.

    I struggle not to let the bitterness set in.

    I struggle to hold my tongue when my dignity is disregarded.

    I struggle not to internalize the weight of microaggressions—those paper cuts that don’t bleed but never quite heal either.

    And underneath it all is a rage most people don’t want to acknowledge.

    Not because it isn’t real. But if they acknowledged it, they’d have to admit they helped cause it.

    What would they think, these coworkers and strangers and casual acquaintances,

    if they knew what it takes for me to walk through the world as calmly as I do?

    What would they feel if they could feel the heat I have to suppress just to make them comfortable?

    What if they knew that beneath this patience is a warrior holding his sword with the blade facing inward?

    We are not angry without reason.

    We are angry because we are still here, and still treated like ghosts.

    We are angry because we know what our fathers swallowed.

    Because we watched our mothers turn crumbs into miracles.

    Because we are still expected to smile while being slowly erased.

    And yet…

    We rise early. We go to work. We raise children. We love.

    We choose empathy when anger would be easier.

    We wear the mask, not because we are afraid, but because we know the cost of taking it off.

    Some mornings I fail.

    I lose my temper. I withdraw. I despair.

    But most mornings, I try again.

    Because the work isn’t just surviving.

    The work is staying human in a world that profits off your dehumanization.

    And so, I practice patience.

    Not because the world deserves it.

    But because I do.

    By Kyle Hayes

    Please like, comment, and subscribe.