Ghost Ranch

I'm so grateful that you are here with me today.

A couple of weeks ago, I attended my first writing and photography retreat at the Ghost Ranch in New Mexico.

If you've never heard of Ghost Ranch, it's a magical place where the famous artist Georgia O'Keeffe spent many years painting and finding inspiration in the desert landscape.

It is harsh and beautiful.

And if you watch this episode on my YouTube channel, I will be showing many of the photos I took during that week.

And while I still value learning and taking an active role in my well-being, I've also begun to recognize how exhausting that constant search can become.

Sometimes I think I've been trying so hard to feel better or pursue the next step or plan that I forget to give myself permission to fully live.

And being at Ghost Ranch allowed me to put a short pause on the busyness of everyday life and give myself some time and space to reflect.

I did just get back from a dig.

We actually have a field site in Ghost Ranch, New Mexico, a really gorgeous part of the world in northern New Mexico.

We've been collecting fossils at this place for over 20 years now.

It's the

Like maybe it was like a rock or something or a mineral that you're like, okay, we got to get a geologist over here.

Like I just found this cool rock.

It happens occasionally, and it happens a lot in places that we work in the Southwest, like Ghost Ranch or Petrified Forest National Park, where there's also, these are areas that have had human occupation for hundreds and hundreds of years, and there's a lot of active archaeological sites.

So it's not uncommon for archaeologists to stumble on paleontological finds and call them the paleontologists or paleontologists to

... stereo deal in it at all." Uh, I could elaborate even more.

There's even one more at, being at Ghost Ranch in Abiquiu, New Mexico, where something happened that had to deal with ghost horses maybe.

I don't know.

Uh, those are mine.

And, starting in October 2027, London will get a rare opportunity of its own.

The Courtauld Gallery is mounting the first exhibition ever devoted to the landscapes O'Keeffe painted at Ghost Ranch, her home in the New Mexico desert.

Nearly two dozen works, most of them never shown in Britain before, in a country where not a single public collection owns an O'Keeffe.

Black Iris, however, still belongs to the Metropolitan Museum on Fifth Avenue.

And I, um, And I was hiking them for a little while, and I really picked up on generosity from Prison Mike.

He is maybe a little bit more well-off than a lot of other hikers out here, and he... was so willing to just share whether that was like the best trail magic I feel like I received on this trail was from him another hiker who I got to this road and this giant storm was coming through and I was gonna head into Ghost Ranch down in New Mexico and I was gonna probably camp and I was like did not want to camp in this storm.

And I just got to this road and I got a text message from him when I got service.

And it was like, Hey, I got a room for everybody.