Love Letter to Ramah : Living Beside New Mexico's Trail of the Ancients

In 1998 Tim and Lucia Amsden left their familiar lives in Kansas City and moved to the Ramah Valley in northwestern New Mexico. Love Letter to Ramah recounts their two decades of experiences there, nestled among an eclectic and diverse community of loving, earth-rooted people. It is also an evocation of the rich human and natural history permeating the area and the importance central to the traditional beliefs of Indigenous people of living in concert with the living earth.

They built their house a few miles outside the tiny town of Ramah, an area where Mormons farm, old Spanish missions hunker above the bones of ancient peoples, and Native cultures abound. Beside the town runs New Mexico Highway 53, a two-lane road that meanders southwest from Grants to the Arizona border, tracing an ancient trade and exploration route that has existed for more than a thousand years.

Much of New Mexico carries a strong sense of place, and that’s especially true in the Ramah area where the rich cultural tapestry, the geology and natural history, and the sky and brilliant night stars all give the land a deep and abiding energy. Many traditional Native American belief systems recognize the spiritual life of all things; in the land of the Puebloans and the Navajo, it’s easy to believe.

Living in that place and within that community gave Tim and Lucia a profound and visceral understanding of our need to move the fragile blue marble of our earth back into balance. Just as important, it enhanced their awareness that we must shift ourselves into acknowledgment of and respect for our global community. It also gave them a firm belief that those things are indeed possible.