by Molly Boyle on
SHANNON CARR-STEVENS WANTED to find a way to photograph the stories of her parents.
Like her dad’s boyhood memories of being a lonely shepherd at a camp on Laguna Pueblo in the monsoon-rich days of the 1940s, watching over the animals under a sea of puffy clouds.
“He was out at seven years old for two weeks at a time by himself, herding sheep,” she says of her father, Daniel Carr, who turned 89 in September. “He hated it.”
When she travels, she looks for sheep figurines to bring back for her dad, who saw his family’s herd shrink from 1,200 head to 250 after government restrictions. “He and all his siblings, eight of them—they grew up herding sheep,” she says.
We’re sipping frosty Coke Zeros together in the living room of her folks’ house on a waning day of the driest New Mexico summer on record at Laguna. We’re also trying to pin down why she began offering free studio portrait sessions for Pueblo elders in 2023. To get there, we have to start with her parents’ recollections.
She says her late mother’s memories were more whimsical. “When she was a little girl up in Hopi, they would go down to the corral where there were horses,” Carr-Stevens says. Her mother and her siblings would pluck a few horsehairs, and then they would run over to the lavender patch that grew along the wash.
The lavender blooms were always a draw for bees, and therefore the locus of a precise rite: “They would catch the bees, and then they would shove them in the sand,” she says. “They would start picking at the sand until they saw a little leg, and then they would get the horsehair and tie it around the leg of the bee. And then they would do Bee Balloons!” She giggles.
Picturing a strand dangling from a bee’s escape over purple blossoms, trying to evade a girl’s grasp, I absorb her vision. Who wouldn’t want actual images to accompany these stories?
Carr-Stevens understands that these childhood legends are now written on her family elders’ faces, that even juicier stories are recorded thusly. So she scheduled a free photo session for anyone who showed up at K′awaika Senior Center, making up a flyer to invite any elder who wanted a portrait. Word of mouth grew, so she set up another one. Then the Acoma Pueblo police chief, a friend, helped schedule the gymnasium there for her to take pictures of their senior citizens who came in to be photographed—and unlike the more casual Laguna folks in football jerseys and sweatshirts, these elders came dressed to the nines in traditional clothing. She’s since been to centers at Santa Ana and Jemez to photograph their old folks too, however they show up. She’s there to put them at ease, to get a good picture of who they are.
“I’m not photographing them for clicks or for likes,” she says. “Even the ones that are more shy, more withdrawn, more quiet, the ones with dementia—I want them to have their dignity.” Today, an entire generation of Pueblo elder portraits sits on files on her computer. “I would charge them just what it was costing me in Albuquerque,” she says—a dollar for a 5-x-7-inch print, $2 for an 8 x 10.
Carr-Stevens arranges return trips to present subjects with their photos. “I tell them, ‘I’m going to be here on this date. Come up, and you can see your photos,’ ” she says. More than their relatives having pictures of them for posterity, she says she wants these older people to see themselves showing up in a photo that respects the experience that’s etched into the lines on their faces.
TO CONTRADICT W.B. YEATS, and thereafter, Cormac McCarthy—the Land of Enchantment is country for old men—and women too.
“There’s a history of elder wisdom in New Mexico,” says New York Times bestselling author Chip Conley, a motivational guru and two-time cancer survivor who has just turned 66. Conley is helping to define what it means to be a “modern elder” by offering a special brand of wisdom at his Modern Elder Academy (MEA) outside Lamy. Here, on a nearly 2,600-acre former horse and cattle ranch, workshops and retreats take place with big-name authors like Elizabeth Gilbert and Pico Iyer. Local guest faculty have included Albuquerque-based priest Richard Rohr and Harvard-trained psychologist Joan Borysenko, a Santa Fe pioneer of integrative medicine.
When I sit in on “How to Be an Impactful Modern Elder,” a signature weekend MEA workshop led by Conley, I’m one of a group of 15 or so, mostly women—some from the West Coast, some from the East, one from Mexico, and one from Israel. All have come together to discuss intergenerational collaboration in the workplace, or how to “show up with curiosity so they won’t notice your wrinkles.” According to Conley, some of their most important conversations this weekend will take place on the ranch’s closest body of water—a pond, where a motorized hot tub is the only nautical vessel.
“Knowledge has become a commodity,” he tells me over an organic vegetarian lunch at the campus cafeteria. “The real question we need to ask ourselves is, What’s going to balance artificial intelligence? It’s ethics, and human wisdom includes ethics. Imagination, intuition, empathy—many of the qualities artificial intelligence has not gotten right yet. The idea of wisdom means: How do you help people to understand how to metabolize their life experience and make it valuable in the world?”
After time with Conley’s cohort, my notebook is buzzing with what it might mean to be a “collaborative modern elder” in the workplace: someone who recognizes that “asking good questions makes a wise person” who embodies “genuine curiosity” and “selfless support,” who “provokes further inquiry with empathy” and “leads without judgment.” There are four steps to becoming a paradigmatic elder, Conley says: evolve, collaborate, learn, and counsel. All these qualities make for a better journalist, I decide, and resolve to implement them.
But I’m still wondering what makes for a New Mexico–specific impactful elder. I suspect the answer has something to do with cultural preservation—like how Carr-Stevens, at age 57, is helping to document the legacies of Pueblo seniors. So I ask folklorist and author Nasario García to weigh in.
At 90, García is one of the guardians of the centuries-old Spanish dialect that is particular to northern New Mexico, having published 35 books that span memoir, folklore, Spanish-language instruction, and cultural history. Growing up in the Río Puerco Valley southeast of Chaco Canyon, García attended a one-room schoolhouse with eight grades.
“I spoke the language of the old-timers,” he says, “because it’s still considered the northern New Mexico dialect.” For the past three years, he has been working on a manuscript titled Spanish of the Río Puerco, having interviewed more than 160 elders who speak it, many of whom passed away decades ago. But when I visit him in his book-lined Santa Fe home, his thoughts about preserving these old ways of speaking are surprising.
“The Spanish I grew up with, that I have recaptured in my folklore books—I think all that is virtually gone,” he tells me. I ask him to elaborate. “It’s unrealistic to expect for something to last forever. The Spanish in New Mexico lasted for over 400 years. We can’t expect it to go for another 400.”
He recalls the first oral history he did with his grandparents, aged 100 and 89 at the time. At the end, he thanked his grandmother. She replied, “Hito, on this Earth, all good things must come to an end.”
Still, she also left him with another consejo, one I take to heart. As the village curandera, his maternal grandmother was always dispensing remedios during the summers he spent with her. “I was the pharmacist in residence,” he recalls, helping to boil tonics and elixirs for each patient. At the end of a long, tiring day, when he was making a face, she asked him what was wrong. “I said, ‘Grandma, if you want to know, I’m going to let you have it. Only women ever come here.’ ”
“And she looked me straight in the eye and she said, ‘Hijito, blessed art thou who are amongst women.’ ”
“That inspired me,” he says, settling back in his chair.
ON A SWELTERING AUGUST MORNING in the northern village of Dixon, a quintet of elder women is lined up to talk to students at the community center. On the third day of “Community-Based Archaeology and Oral History of Indo-Hispano New Mexico”—a weeklong summer field course that’s jointly offered to University of New Mexico students and Barnard College/Columbia University undergrads from New York City—the lineup of speakers includes Mickey Jaramillo from Tierra Amarilla, Antoinette Rael from Pecos, Liz Riedel from Embudo, Virginia Griego from Dixon and Ranchos de Taos, and Sylvia Rodriguez, a professor emerita of anthropology at UNM who grew up in Taos. Team-taught by professors Levi Romero from UNM and Severin Fowles from Barnard and Columbia, the students—who mostly hail from cultural studies, anthropology, or archaeology departments—are spending the week excavating a morada site that was demolished in the 1950s. Today, the class is getting an earful about the former building’s significance to the community.
Each speaker fills in her own context about Hispano Catholic culture in these mountain towns, where the covert rhythms of the Penitente Brotherhood and the prayers they practiced and sang in their private moradas dictated an entire way of life throughout most of the 20th century. It’s a mutual-aid society that still exists for many of today’s Hermandad, as the lay confraternity is informally called, as well as the all-women Guadalupanas, who make an annual pilgrimage to Chimayó.
“The resiliency of our communities is based on knowing who we are as a people,” Romero has written, “having respect for our heritage and the land that we have been granted, and a respect for the cultural traditions that have made us who we are.” As a native son of Dixon and the state’s first poet laureate, he has been teaching the class with Fowles, the town’s resident archaeologist, since 2019. “In addition, we must honor each other,” Romero adds.
“No one has excavated a morada before,” Fowles says, at least not in the field-school sense. “I mean, archaeologists have ignored this material Hispano heritage.” Over the years, his students have spent time digging at other local historic sites, including on the Dixon plaza; helping the nearby community of Pilar fix up their Nuestra Señora de los Dolores chapel; and assisting with feast day preparations at neighboring Picuris Pueblo. Before this year’s excavation is over, the class will excitedly uncover an entire glass-beaded rosary at the site of the former prayer house. Another more unexpected find, a dusty midcentury-era Dairy Queen spoon, conjures speculation about someone enjoying an ice cream sundae one long-ago day in the ruins of the old morada.
Today, though, the students are raptly listening to the elder women, waiting for pauses to ask key questions, taking notes, and recording video. On a break outside the community center, I ask UNM student James Romero, who has generational roots in the Embudo Valley, what he’s getting out of the day’s speakers.
“The whole project has just been really eye-opening,” says the 34-year-old, who has spent time as a member of his own local morada in Arroyo Seco. “Just the wealth of knowledge that exists in these elders, these mentors, these scholars—it’s truly amazing.” After talking to some of the Barnard women in the course, he’s starting to see his own sacred ancestral landscape through their awestruck urban lenses.
“People like ourselves that are a part of this community don’t realize how fortunate, how rich we are, to be able to have people still living who are willing to share our stories with us,” James says. “It’s my job this week—and going forward as a student,” he adds in a serious tone, “to continue to do the work, day in and day out, to preserve these stories.”
THE SMOKE FROM THE FRIJOLES FIRE burning in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains is making an impressive plume in early August. It winds itself around the students’ experience in the Embudo Valley, irritating everyone’s eyes and lungs, initiating new anxieties about the hotter, drier state we’re all living in.
When I stop for iced tea in Taos, the thirtysomething barista is complaining to two friends about what none of the parciantes seem to understand about her local acequia system: “There is no water,” she says, shaking her head. “No water to share, no water to fight over.”
I’m on my way to investigate the elder wisdom that’s left at the intentional living and spiritual retreat center that was established in the summer of 1967 around a semi-miraculous mountainside spring near San Cristóbal, a half hour north of Taos. The first of many communes that sprouted in the area, the Lama Foundation is still centered around the iconic geodesic dome designed in part by co-founder Steve Durkee (later known as Nooruddeen Durkee), with construction directed by Little Joe Gomez of Taos Pueblo. Having survived a near-devastating fire in 1996, the building still stands as the nucleus of a retreat place that has nurtured tens of thousands of spiritual seekers—and gave collaborative birth to the 1971 Ram Dass bestseller Be Here Now.
The Lama Foundation doesn’t have much water either, I learn on a tour of the commune, after part-time resident Kathy Eads opens the cherished hand-built spring-house to show me a record-low level. The current full-timers turn out to be four earnest young people of different denominations between the ages of 28 and 38, who are selected on a 100-percent consensus basis by the others, and limited to seven-year residencies. During my visit, the residents openly discuss the new realities of hauling water up to the mountain, limiting showers for guests, and taking on visitors who do silent hermitages at the on-site retreat houses for shorter stints.
Here, it seems, accumulated wisdom is passed down through longtime practices built from living in community, rather than solely embodied by elders themselves. The stacked library is another pillar. Located just off the Dome, with dreamy picture-window nooks and sections that go from Addictions to Permaculture to Yoga, the gorgeous sanctuary contains more than 5,000 books.
I participate haltingly in an evening session of Zikr, the hypnotic Sufi song-and-dance ritual, with residents, seasonal live-in stewards, and guest “Lama beans,” who come from places like Los Angeles, Germany, Philadelphia, and the Texas Hill Country. As we join hands, singing lyrics in Aramaic, English, and Arabic, one resident tells me to stop paying so much attention to my feet. I give in to the group’s rhythms, a swaying two-step in clockwise motion with fluid head movements. Then, during an hourlong sound bath, I watch as tiny stars appear through the eight-pointed window above us.
Soon, I peacefully retreat to my solitary quarters for the evening, a sustainable cabin that was recently designed and built in partnership with University of Colorado Boulder architecture students. The moon, ripening to full, is a speckled egg lighting my way through the dark trails.
I spend the rest of the night sitting on the mountainside porch overlooking a vast ocean of silvery clouds below, pondering the power of living in community and spiritual harmony in this stunning corner of New Mexico. In this great love, there is no separation, goes the translation of the Islamic lullaby we just sang. I am thinking about how the best kind of clarity doesn’t come from religion, research, or lifestyle choices, or even perhaps a reliable water source. It’s about the people and the places you find along the way and what it means to listen to them.
Managing Editor Molly Boyle gleaned much elder wisdom from the late Dolly Parton.