The moment my feet touch the tarmac, she is with me. Her outline first—the lacy veil, the open palms, the white-gold halo of flames and aura of red roses, her kind eyes looking directly at my heart. She is inside of me, radiating out. But the Virgin of Guadalupe inside me is covered in a dried mud casing.

I can’t shake her. She follows me out of the Albuquerque airport into the rental car and along the Turquoise Trail. Her shape hovers in the fog of my peripheral awareness.  In Madrid, as we step out onto the gravel road in front of an antique store with a wooden porch and rocking chairs, I tell my best friend and traveling companion, Delisa, about the Guadalupe’s startling presence and that the focus of this trip is becoming quite clear—to break my heart open. To loosen the chokehold of fear that has kept me protected for decades from the possible torture of true love that may not be requited. The love that gets your hopes up and then leaves one day for a younger woman. Or just leaves because the man is scared of that kind of profound love.

I have always been the one to walk away, never looking back. Many men lay bleeding in the dust on my trail of relationships. I have acted heartlessly, cowardly. One time, while on an Ayahuasca journey where my intention was to increase my psychic abilities and be a true healer to my dance students, I had to emotionally travel through every relationship where I had abandoned and betrayed a man in this lifetime. And ask them for forgiveness. Ouch.

Yet what do I want in my heart of hearts? To passionately love a man without barriers. To be loved this way; to want to die for my man and him for me. Yikes! I scare myself every time I tiptoe to the edge of this deep longing. I refuse to let love annihilate me, yet…

Why has the Virgin of Guadalupe, the mother goddess icon of love in the Mexican and Native American Catholic tradition, haloed by a garland of blood-red roses, decided to appear in my consciousness? And right when I land in New Mexico to travel to the magic places I return to often? The hot springs, the remote Benedictine monastery, the rutted, iron-red dirt road through painted canyons, the eroded ruins of ancient cultures long gone, peppered with pottery chards laying in their crumbled architecture like hardened bookmarks?

Delisa and I become aware on the drive through the ghostly mining towns leading the back way to Santa Fe, that the image of Guadalupe is everywhere. Think Coca-Cola, think 7-Eleven, think Walmart. She is ubiquitous.

She persistently taps me on the shoulder, lectures to me of love and that it is my last frontier.  And she won’t give it a break. On T-shirts, wall murals, my mindscape. Everywhere we turn, there she is.

We spend several nights at Ojo Caliente Mineral Springs Resort, ancient hot springs pouring out of the cliff sides. Sulphur, soda, calcium, arsenic, lithium. A potpourri of healing yet poisonous minerals seeping through our pores, beads of sweat gathering as we lay immersed under star-black sky. Tewa Indian spirits roam down the cliffs from the five-hundred-year-old Posi-Ouinge pueblo ruinsabove.

Delisa and I are both sensitive to the whispers from beyond, to the wisdom and the chaos of spirits knocking on our door.

She shows up embroidered on Delisa’s blouse pattern, stenciled on the napkins in the spa restaurant. I pray that the clay she’s incased in crumbles, exposing my heart to love and light. I feel my fear of abandonment and wash it over and over, trying to scrub out the grayed stains of mistrust and broken ties.

In the bright light of day, I hike up a dried waterfall bed, sunlight glinting off mica. My guide, Jason, says, “You must meet the poet. We have a poet working here,” when he discovers I’m a writer. Back in the dim light of the resort’s lobby, I’m surrounded by three attractive men. Jason, hiking guide and Calvin Klein jean model, who also runs the spa; Mike, the hotel manager, who is really into spirituality and lends me a book on quantum physics; and the poet. They are all fixated on  me. It’s weird.

Feeling flustered by all the male attention, I retreat to the breakfast table where Delisa is sitting. A scraping of wooden chair feet on Saltillo tile announces the arrival of a visitor to our breakfast klatch. The poet. His agate-green eyes gleam as if he is going to savor a pastry and has his eyes on the first sugary bite. Instead, he recites a poem about the ruins here. A dramatic delivery with voice ebbing and weaving, dancing on the words. It is a pretty good poem. He recites another. I’m getting sucked in. The face is cragged but boyish. Impish. Sparkly. Broad shoulders. Talented, too… even though the missing tooth is a bit distracting. The invitation to join him in his creative-word-play rowboat hovers on the riverbank of temptation, beckoning me.

Toward the end of the day, he gathers me and Delisa up in his truck and wants to take us “to a remote place, one where there are no people.” To me, this is just about everywhere in New Mexico, but he seems to think even this place between nowhere is crowded, polluted with tourism.

We bump along dirt roads over grey-green sage desert plateaus, occasionally passing a dusty, dented trailer with a wooden fence around it, but no livestock or humans. Abruptly, the road drops out from under us. It pours steeply down into a vast canyon. He says he used to come here often to bring supplies to a Native American Shaman who had once been his teacher and guide. The poet learned from him the spirit calls and the chants to the four directions. On the canyon floor, we stop. Purple-black ravens skim the canyon rim and caw and cackle as they wheel above us.  I look up and there she is, high on the cliff side. Our Lady of Guadalupe in perfect form. I point it out and he says, “You can see that? Only pilgrims can see it. She is not carved there; it is just a watermark or some other stain. I can’t see it that well but the Shaman said it is there.” The poet does not know that Guadalupe is tracking me. For a reason. He and my heart have a date.

To me she is crystal clear, as if she is carved in bas-relief. I must get closer and carefully walk amid the thick sagebrush and chamisa with its heavy-headed, ochre-yellow blooms inking my skin in pollen, keeping an eye out for rattlesnakes.

When I return to the truck at dusk from my meditation, he takes a picture of me dancing on a rock. I’m dressed in moss green with a rose imprinted bronze locket around my neck that I bought at that antique store in Madrid. I will never see this photo. Later, I will put a small picture of Guadalupe, cut out from a magazine, inside the locket.

Back in the truck, he and I sit close, legs warm against each other. Fortunately, Delisa is in the back seat and not paying any attention to what is happening  between him and me. He reaches over, takes my hand, turning it slowly, and kisses the palm. His moist breath licks my inner skin. Oh my god. My temperature is rising. Struck by passion, wooed by the poet. He is the snake in my garden.

We stop at a cascade of icy spring water gushing from a pipe on the cliff. Standing in a circle around the splashing water, each of us creates a blessing to the earth and sky and each other. A surreal frisson sets upon us and magical, meaningful words pour forth. He chants, I dance, Delisa blesses. We wander down to the riverbank where swallows skim the coppery surface. Delisa says, “I see native people looking down from the cliff at us. Many of them.” She is standing on a berm slightly above me and the poet, and without intending to, her voice deeper than usual, she intones, “We are witness to man and woman joining in sacred union on the ancient banks of time.” The poet and I stare into each other’s eyes, both knowing a miracle is occurring. Now. We are that man and woman. Delisa is our priestess. Rose colored, tall and gorgeous, she marries us on the banks of the Rio Grande River.

He takes us to dinner at the spa. As he holds the restaurant door open and I walk past, he pulls me tight against his tall frame and snap! Our mouths lock as we meet in our first embrace and kiss. A kiss so passionate a woman faints in the lobby for no reason.

We eat dinner and can’t keep from roaming with eyes and hands and lips on each other’s terrain. Delisa is smiling indulgently at us. She is a four in the Enneagram and a romantic. She is a part of the story of love found and is being a supportive friend. No wonder: I hooked her up with her husband.

Standing outside, in the fragrant blue smoke of the pinyon bonfire lit for guests on chilly evenings, she says goodnight. He and I twine around each other, hugging to keep warm. Lips relentless in their search for the innerness of each other. He goes back to the lobby and returns with a room key. “Would you like to join me? We can sit by the fire in the suite and talk.”

Talk? Ha!

His kisses are so fiery they hurt; I can burn up from them. All I am wearing is my locket. He pushes me against the smooth adobe wall, pressing parts of me hard into the clay, imprinting his heat, his intensity carving invisible poetry into the curves of my flesh. I know my shadow still lingers on that skin-pink adobe wall. The handprint bruises on my forearms lasted a week, each one a faded poem.

His words in the morning follow the speechless night. It is confusing.  I cannot talk. My heart is everywhere in my body.

Laying next to me, he pulls me close and cries out, sobbing, “Precious, precious Lisa. I love you,” followed by, “Maybe we should just walk away and treat this as a dream.” Then the longing returns and he implores, “Come to Telluride with me next weekend to a poetry reading.”

I can’t answer one way or another. I must think about all this. I gather my clothes, and drive to the monastery with Delisa for our two-day silent retreat, planned for months. I write love poems in the chill dusk setting over the Chamas River, golden cottonwoods electric in their turning. At mass, the Gregorian chants bring forth tears. I thank Guadalupe for the beauty, and the breaking open.

I call him as soon as we leave the canyon and there is cell service. I leave a tantalizing message saying yes to Telluride. He calls back. His voice is flat. Uninterested. My stomach caves in. I call him back and ask why he is so vague after our stunningly mystical connection.

“You’ve gone from one hundred to zero in a minute; I guess there is nothing there. Maybe Telluride is not a good idea,” he says, sarcasm searing my ears. How can he so easily make me wrong and needy? Passion is not a curse, yet I feel him placing a curse on the possibility of us.

Back in Santa Fe, I cry over dense Mayan chile hot chocolate at Kakawa Chocolate House, Guadalupe opening her palms to me on the image on my mug, of course. Swollen tears splash on my dark blue silk blouse. Delisa tries to comfort me and says, “He is just a chickenshit terrified of love.”

My heart aches and trembles in disbelief that this man did not want what was between us. The gift of passion and possibility. On the phone he also told me, “Funny that it has been a year of not meeting any women who interested me, and last weekend I met two on the same day: you and another woman, a student writer who is living close by in Abiquiu. You live far away; this is simpler.”

My nightmare is born. He has met another woman, younger probably. Maybe.

Why, Guadalupe, did you not deliver me into the sacred arms of love? Why am I abandoned yet again? Can’t I tell another story? My upbeat, positive self cheers me on, “Because you are meant to believe in yourself and be truly independent in this lifetime.”

Crap, crap, crap.

Guadalupe, why? The red clay is drying and the color fading to the dull hue of fallen rose petals as I mud up my heart, again.

This story is included in my book Exotic Life: Travel Tales of an Adventurous Woman.