Shawn Marie Graybeal-Sellers

Dear New Mexico

Foreword — The Light Here Is Different Shawn Graybeal-Sellers · April 2026

Dear New Mexico,

I don’t know exactly when you stopped being a place and became something closer to a presence in my life. Maybe it was the first time I noticed how your light doesn’t just fall. It lingers. Or the way your sky stretches so wide it makes everything else feel smaller, quieter, more honest.

In Albuquerque, you make yourself known in details.

In the South Valley, where cottonwoods lean over narrow roads and the air smells faintly of earth and water, even in the dry. In the early mornings along the bosque, when the river moves slow and steady and the world hasn’t quite decided what it’s going to be yet. In the fall, when the smell of roasting green chile drifts through neighborhoods and parking lots, sharp and warm and unmistakable, like a signal that something familiar is returning. In the sudden rush of wings overhead, geese cutting across the sky in long, uneven lines, their calls echoing in a way that feels both distant and close at the same time.

You are beautiful. There’s no denying that.

But that isn’t the whole truth of you.

You are Central Avenue after dark. Neon flickering over old motels that have seen better decades. You are tents tucked along the edges of the city, people carrying everything they own in a cart or a backpack, carving out space where there isn’t enough to give. You are the quiet, complicated reality of homelessness, visible, persistent, impossible to ignore if you’re willing to really look.

You are chain-link fences and yards worn down to dirt. You are heat that presses down in July and doesn’t apologize. You are the version of yourself people think they know from a distance, the one they saw on television, where everything feels like it’s one decision away from collapse.

They’re not entirely wrong.

There is struggle here. Addiction that cuts through families like weather. Poverty that outlasts good intentions. There are nights that stretch thin, where sirens carry farther than they ought to, where the line between getting by and falling apart feels too narrow to trust.

But that isn’t the whole truth either.

Because there’s the Frontier at midnight, full of students, families, night-shift workers, people who know each other without needing introductions. There are front yards where neighbors still talk across fences, where someone is always watching out, even if they don’t say it out loud. There are people who stay, not because it’s easy, but because it’s theirs.

You don’t offer ease.

You offer space. You offer honesty. You offer a kind of belonging that has to be earned.

There are ruins here that remind us how long people have been trying to make a life in this place, walls built by hands we’ll never name, standing in cottonwood groves at the foot of mountains that were old before any of us arrived. There are stories in the ground, of loss and resilience, of things taken and things held onto anyway. You carry all of it without trying to soften it.

And somehow, that’s what makes you feel real.

Because loving you isn’t about pretending you’re perfect. It’s about seeing all of it, the light and what it reveals, the grit and what it demands, and choosing you anyway.

Choosing the smell of chile in the fall.

Choosing the sound of geese overhead, reminding us that movement and return are part of the same story.

Choosing the quiet mornings in the bosque, when the cottonwoods hold the mist and the herons stand perfectly still in the shallows.

Choosing the long drives where the land looks empty until Shiprock rises from the flatlands and the desert reminds you what it’s been holding all along.

Choosing the way the Sandias catch the last light of the day and go pink, then amber, then a color that doesn’t have a name in English, even after everything else has gone dark.

You do not try to be anything other than what you are.

And because of that, you ask the same of me.

Love Always

Shawn Graybeal-Sellers has lived in New Mexico since December 1984. She is a historian, teacher, and writer based in Albuquerque. The Light Here Is Different is forthcoming.