August 2008
A Travel Bug Finds a Home
by Cindy Bellinger
From the moment Barbara Heming first set foot in New Mexico, she knew this was the place. Still, it took a while to find the exact locale. Living in Ohio, she first visited Taos. But that didn’t do it. She didn’t like Albuquerque. She didn’t connect with Santa Fe.
“Then I took a class at Ghost Ranch. Driving up there I saw the red rocks near Abiquiu and said to myself, ‘I have to live here.’ When I opened the car door, the first thing I saw was a raven feather,” she says.
That was all she needed. It was a sign. Heming, 63, now lives in Cañones and oddly enough, but it’s a common story, having spent most of her life in various places on the East Coast and Midwest, she feels more at home here. She moved here three years ago. “The land also reminds me of Spain and Peru—the low desert, lack of humidity. There’s something about the land here. It’s a feminine energy,” says Heming.
In college, she majored in religion and immersed herself in social justice. “I wanted to save the world and began living and working in the south side of Chicago during the civil rights movement,” she says. In her junior year, she went to Madrid, Spain and for seven months studied Spanish art, literature and history. “I fell in love with the Spanish language. I experienced no culture shock going to Spain. The culture shock was coming back to America,” she says.
She began studying Spanish in earnest, ended up teaching Spanish and spending more time—several times—in Spain. Heming finally earned a PhD in Hispanic Language and Literature. Her teaching resume reads more like a travel book: District of Columbia; Massachusetts; New York; Wisconsin; Maryland; Pennsylvania—with jaunts, of course, to Spain and South America. She also married along the way but divorced in the early 1990s.
“I began missing religion, which I first studied,” she says. So she moved to a monastery in Peru for six months. “It was life-changing.” Upon returning, she entered the Sisters of the Humility of Mary and became a nun. She stayed five years.
“I left because they didn’t walk the talk,” says Heming, who again took a teaching job in Ohio. Then her continuing inner search brought her to New Mexico. After moving here, she spent a great deal of time “getting free of the negative stuff from the religious community.”
Here, she’s finding the land healing—the skies, the vistas. “It puts you in your place in the universe,” she says. “It’s an honest landscape…the harshness and the stark beauty, nothing is hidden. Along with the dry clear air, there is a feeling of honesty.” Currently she’s writing a novel, is a creativity coach and leads tours at the Georgia O’Keeffe Home and Studio in Abiquiu. If they ever need a tour in Spanish, Heming is certainly the one to call on.
If you know anyone who’d make a good profile for this column—including yourself—let us know at sespinoza@enchantment.coop.
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