We picked Santa Fe for our 2026 vacation. Neither of us had been there, and we didn’t know quite what we were getting into. That was part of the appeal.

Fabienne got there first for a week of yoga and meditative Chakra Dance. She spent the week with a small group, seeing Santa Fe, making new friends and doing considerably more looking inward than I had planned for my part of the trip. She came away refreshed and ready for what was next. I’ll leave the rest of that story to her.

The Cathedral Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

I arrived a week later with a bad knee, a good appetite and my camera.

My plans were simpler. Walk around as much as the knee would allow, eat well and see what Santa Fe looked like through a viewfinder. I take my cue from what flits in front of my eyes.

There was plenty to point a camera at. Adobe buildings, old churches, galleries, odd corners and reminders that people had been living here for a long time before tourists started buying turquoise earrings.

And above all of it was that New Mexico sky. Deep blue, with enormous white clouds drifting around as though somebody had ordered them for the photographs. Later I began noticing those same clouds in Native art, drawings and writing. They weren’t scenery. They belonged to the place and to the people who had lived under them for generations. In their own way, they seemed to say: home.