The Mountains Call Me Home

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Dear Friend,

A long time ago it seems, in my late 20s, I heard a call. It was no ordinary call. 

I was driving across the United States, from the frenetic world of New York City toward California. My friends were in a car in front of me and we were crossing through Arkansas, along the Arkansas River Valley and the edge of the Ozark Mountains. 

It all happened so quickly. Within seconds, I began to cry with a force that took over my being. And it was then, I heard the call. My own voice spoke. “Go to the Sandia Mountains,” it said as I looked up, through teary eyes, at a sign marking the city of Alma along the highway. 

How ironic it seemed to hear myself saying the words of a place I didn’t know existed, and for this to have happened upon passing a city named Alma, which means “soul” in Spanish. My mind soon concluded that the Sandia Mountains were in California, most likely in Los Angeles, since it was reasonable I’d do well in the film world after years of working as a photojournalist and writer.

But nature, and that of the wild soul, works in mysterious ways. There’s nothing rational about it. So, when I landed in New Mexico on the way to California, something nudged me to stay. My friends went onto the West Coast and a week in New Mexico soon turned into eight months. And there I was, living in Albuquerque where, unbeknownst to me (or at least at the beginning), the Sandia Mountains hovered above. 

My story of that unusual call of twenty-plus years ago is a long one. But what I can say, is there, in New Mexico, I injured myself and while I moved to California eight months later, I made a pact with the land to one day return. 

That was the beginning of a long and arduous healing journey, which ultimately brought me back to New Mexico in my late 30s in 2008. Today, I live in a house that looks toward those same Sandia Mountains that called me. And more recently, a part of my soul, which had chosen to stay here in the mountains as I struggled to find home elsewhere, returned to me in a soul retrieval. 

Today, the duendes, the elves and nature spirits, of this land are with me. Yet there are plenty of times I don’t listen. I get caught up in the hustle of daily life and forget their presence, forget the call of the land, of our Earth, and lose my way. But this mysterious force is always waiting for me, and for all of us, inside the mountains and valleys of our Earth. 

Have you ever been called by a place inside nature? Have you heeded that call, or did you take the long way home as I did after years of distractions and misguided modern living? 

No matter the answer, I can say that nature will wait for us, and always does, to come back home. The question is, “Are you ready to listen?” 

From my heart to yours. For the Earth

Michelle Adam, OMEC Contributor, Storyteller, Teacher &
Author of Child of Duende and earth-centered children’s stories