A small film of small moments. Made in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Energy, Space, and Time: Notes on Los niños de Santa Fe
Text and Photographs by Daniel Stephensen
In the middle of 2019, a few months after Erin and I married, we moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico. We wanted relief from the punishing cost of living in California and a more salubrious climate for the sake of Erin’s health. We weren’t certain we would stay in New Mexico for longer than a few years: our vision was to find a pastoral setting in which to put down roots and a modest old home on a decently large plot of land that we could lightly farm but otherwise leave wild.
Suffering from an extended period of altitude sickness in Santa Fe, I was unable to locate myself in this strange dry world. I was having trouble understanding the high desert landscape, accustomed as I was to the lush green flora and humid fragrances of life at sea level. But Erin and I had agreed to be fully present here, to find beauty where we were, so I began to take long walks in an effort to change my way of paying attention.
I decided to walk each day in a nearby stretch of Arroyo de los Chamisos, a long, deep wash abundant with small wildlife and plants; the arroyo runs some twenty miles through Santa Fe from Atalaya Mountain to Arroyo Hondo. Chamiso, or chamisa, is the local name for the rubber rabbitbrush plant, whose bright yellow flowers blossom in late summer with a scent one might charitably describe as “sweaty.”
I began pointing the wondrous little camera of the new iPhone Erin had bought me at things I saw on my daily walks. If I could not see clearly, I thought, then I would let the camera see for me, and study its visions and try to see as the camera saw. Usually the camera noticed more than I did. We learned together. Its vision was more patient than mine.
Day by day, I drew closer to things in the arroyo and spent more time with them. I began to see the way the arroyo as a whole was changing, and I changed my perspective to get closer to it. I began to crouch and kneel to see the most delicate, transitory motions of light and life down in the sandy bed of the wash, fixing my gaze and the camera’s gaze on natural things in their places. I came to value each physical motion of attention as a serious, conscious dedication of energy and time. I learned to go into the arroyo empty-minded, without hoping to see anything, focused only on efforts of attention.
In addition to my arroyo walks, Erin and I traveled together around our little patch of New Mexico. I adapted to the altitude. I learned to give all my energy in moments of stillness with my little camera. We gazed at flowers and leaves and trees and saw how they were in motion in their places; we noticed the smallest interactions between insects; we watched the eloquence of New Mexico’s monumental clouds and the gestures of high desert and alpine light, this enthralling presence that seems to be part of a living creature, the light-hands of a goddess. I came to know my small stretch of Arroyo de los Chamisos tree by tree, rock by rock, flower by flower. I learned where I could safely descend the steep sides of the arroyo; I learned where different plants preferred to grow and when they would bud and flower; I looked forward to the blossoming of prairie verbena and cottonwoods, the yellow fruit of the cholla cactus, purple locoweed flowers, and the delicate feathery blossoms of Apache plume.
In winter, after each snowfall, I walked in the arroyo and followed the sparkling braids created by streams of meltwater. I learned how heavy snow temporarily erases the boundaries and constraints that conform pedestrians to certain paths through a city. Erin and I walked often along the east fork of the Jemez River, and in winter we marveled at how snow offered the great valley up there in the mountains time to breathe and rest, how it scattered light and changed the way sound moved. Deer and elk prints in the snow showed us the ways that animals crossed the valley. Rabbit prints showed us where burrows were buried. Bright sun moved low across vast, clear skies, and we would walk from radiance to radiance, admiring the small lives that saw the winter through, los niños, the little ones.
Composer Ennio Morricone described music as “energy, space, and time,” and I can think of no better way to describe any living thing. I arranged this short film, Los niños de Santa Fe, to share my way of paying attention to energy, space, and time in New Mexico. The film’s musical score is part of this attention, and the last motif in the score is particularly poignant to me. Its rising C major scale echoes my memory of an emergency evacuation siren that regularly rang out from a nearby office building when I lived in inner-city Melbourne. The siren’s rising scale was followed by a recorded voice: Evacuate now... Evacuate now... The voice was not urgent. Sometimes the siren would go on for what seemed hours, especially on quiet weekends, to no apparent end.
I arranged Los niños de Santa Fe as an ode to New Mexico, my home now. To live here is to live close to the Earth. Wild nature is present. We rent and buy parts of the land, but it doesn’t belong to us, that much is clear: it belongs to those who were here long before our presence was conceivable, those represented today in New Mexico by twenty-three federally recognized Native tribes. Erin and I are visitors in this land, but the longer we’ve lived here, the closer attention we’ve paid, the more we’ve come to love it.
The Indigenous landscape of the United States continues to be mutilated by capitalism and colonialism, as it has in New Mexico for hundreds of years, and to hope for its deliverance seems pointless: attention and action are what matter. Hope is a fugue, I think, a dissociation from local reality. Even if I have only enough energy in my chronically pained body to pay attention to what is nearby, to take action to see and become part of the land around me, then attention is already more valuable than hope. We pay attention in order to participate. We pay attention in order to participate in the world around us, to see the natural world as it is, to love and respect the land and its resources, and to use our energy and time, however much or little we may have, to contribute to its survival.
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