Shawn Marie Graybeal-Sellers

There was a time when I didn’t think about hiking. I just did it. It was part of the rhythm of my life in the same quiet way that the river moves through the bosque. Weekends, late afternoons, the kind of in-between hours that belong to no one else. I would head out with a camera and a vague sense of direction, not really looking to finish anything so much as to find something. A line of light through cottonwoods. The way dust settles differently in shadow. The places just beyond where most people turn around.

I didn’t start hiking for the miles. I started because I wanted better photographs. Not the ones you can take from a parking lot or a clearly marked overlook, but the ones that ask a little more of you. The ones that require you to leave the trail for a few minutes and see what is just out of sight. That instinct shaped the way I moved through the landscape and, eventually, the way I paid attention to everything else.

Then, for a while, I stopped.

It didn’t happen all at once. Right before everything else changed, I had an emergency appendectomy. The kind of moment that interrupts your life and then expects you to pick it back up as if nothing shifted. Before I had fully found my way back into my normal routines, COVID arrived. New Mexico closed down in ways that felt total and disorienting, and the trails that had always been there in the background of my life became something distant. A place I assumed I would return to when things settled.

They didn’t, not in the way I expected.

In 2024, I had a pulmonary embolism. It came without warning and changed the way I thought about my own body in a matter of hours. Recovery was not clean or linear. The blood thinners that were supposed to protect me led to an upper GI bleed that complicated everything further. What had been a steady, taken-for-granted physical capacity was suddenly uncertain. Walking, something so basic I had never given it much thought, became something I had to measure and monitor.

Living at altitude changes the equation even more. The air that once felt like home felt thin in a way I could not ignore. There were days when even small efforts came with consequences. The kind you do not push through. The kind you learn to respect whether you want to or not.

The trail didn’t go anywhere, but I did. Away from it, gradually, until it became something I thought about more than something I did.

There is a particular kind of absence that settles in when you lose something that used to anchor you. Not dramatic. Not even always obvious. Just a steady awareness that something familiar is missing from the structure of your days. I still had the camera. I still noticed light and texture and the small details that most people pass by. But it was different when it was confined to the edges of parking lots and short walks that never quite became anything more.

Coming back has not looked like I thought it would.

There was no moment where everything snapped into place and I picked up exactly where I left off. It has been slower than that, more deliberate, and more uncertain. My lungs are only now beginning to feel like they belong to me again. Even then, there are limits. Distances that used to be automatic are now decisions. Elevation is something I have to think about. I pay attention in a way that is less casual and more necessary.

The first time back on a trail felt tentative. Not dramatic, but real. Every step was measured, not out of fear exactly, but out of awareness. The ground mattered. The incline mattered. The distance back to the car mattered. The simple act of being there carried a weight it never had when it was easy.

And then something shifted. Small at first. A pause I hadn’t planned. A line of light through the cottonwoods that made me stop and reach for the camera before I had even thought about it. The same pull I had always felt toward the edges of things.

The same patterns began to reassert themselves. The way my attention moves when I am outside. The instinct to pause, to look more closely, to follow a line of shadow or a break in the terrain that suggests something just out of view. The recognition that I was never really hiking to complete trails. I was hiking to step off them.

That instinct is still there.

If anything, it is clearer now. More intentional. I do not move as quickly, and I do not go as far, but I see more. The details feel sharper. The time spent in a place feels fuller, less rushed, less driven by the idea of covering ground. There is a kind of patience that comes from having had to wait, from having had to rebuild something that once felt automatic.

New Mexico makes that return possible in ways that feel almost like a kind of grace. The light does not just fall. It lingers. It shifts slowly across rock and sand and leaves, changing everything without ever feeling abrupt. In the bosque, the river moves the way it always has, steady and indifferent to whether or not I was there to see it. In the foothills, the trails wind through terrain that looks sparse at first glance and then reveals itself in layers if you give it time. I am out there again with the camera, not looking to finish anything, just looking.