“I've been absolutely terrified every moment of my life and I've never let it keep me from doing a single thing that I wanted to do.” ― Georgia O'Keefe

I have been thinking of the pink-smeared skies of Santa Fe and the magic of Taos, New Mexico, and how every day I wear the silver and turquoise rings I got there as I clink-clack through the day. I have been reading  My Faraway One: Selected Letters of Georgia O'Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz: Volume One, 1915-1933 again, and as I sit inside a very happy part of my life, I reflect on when I got the book. It was late summer 2021 and I traveled to New Mexico with a dear friend on what we thought would be a simple girls' getaway—a retreat from real life. It turned out to be much more than that for me—a necessary escape during a time when I was nursing a broken heart. That summer was a liminal space in my life, complicated and entirely shaped by love. I unknowingly sought the mountains for healing, even if I didn’t know it when I left. You know, sometimes you can’t change the heart. It is a cliché grounded in truth. The heart wants what it wants, and so on. Also, the way things unfold is not always linear or without mess. I was limping west with no idea of my future. I was sad, filled with worry and wonder over how love could be so painful yet so beautiful. I wanted to know how my life was going to turn out. I knew at the same time we just must live it to know. That’s the hard part—the trusting.

The whole time I was planning my trip, I knew I wanted to see the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum. I wanted to be around the mountains, surrounded by art, and I had heard her museum was awesome. I was hoping it would shake up my life a little. Georgia O'Keeffe has always been a huge inspiration to me. When I was a nanny for a family with a cool art collection, they had some striking O'Keeffe prints that I would often admire as I babysat. One day, the older son of the family told me that her flowers were