They call New Mexico the Land of Enchantment. If I’d known that before the first time I went there, I wouldn’t have understood why, and would have been skeptical. That’s a particular paradox in my personality - I’m not fond of things that seem to self-consciously smack of the mystical, and yet I am drawn, in a way that feels profoundly mystical, to certain places, feel connected in a way that I wouldn’t even attempt to explain to anyone else - it just is. But the desert had never seemed like such a place to me. I was born in the high parts of the Rocky Mountains, grew up surrounded by blue slopes, green hillsides, lakes settled in deep valleys. Long empty flat spaces didn’t (mentally) draw me. Until the first time I visited New Mexico.
I had been sent there by the President of the college where I worked, for a retreat at the Mabel Dodge Luhan house in Taos. I flew into Albuquerque and then rented a car and drove to Taos. When I landed in Albuquerque, it was nearing sunset. I walked out of the terminal to head down to the lot to pick up my rental, and stopped short, my breath taken away by the beautiful reds, pinks, oranges, and roses in the sunset in the very far distance. I stood there for a while. When I think of it, it reminds me of a scene from a movie I saw later - “Off the Map.” (I recommend it if you haven’t seen it). A young IRS agent comes to audit a young family living off the grid in the New Mexico desert. When 
The drive to Taos that night was unremarkable - it was dark, and the most that I could see was the road in front of me and an occasional road sign letting me know that I had not (yet) gotten lost. In the five years that followed, though, I made that trek to Taos once (sometimes twice) a year for those retreats, and more often than not did the drive in daylight. The first time, I found myself pulling over my car time after time to just stand by the roadside and stare at the mesas and the canyons and the broad expanse of space that is the New Mexico desert. I thought that, on subsequent trips, I would not be so enchanted, that I would be able to drive casually by like so many of us do in the places we live, taking for granted that which we have seen before. I was wrong.
I arrived at the Mabel Dodge Luhan house (a place once frequented by the likes of Thomas Merton, Georgia O’Keeffe, Ansel Adams, and many others) in time for an evening gathering around the fire, and then found my way to my room - a sweet small room with stucco walls and arched windows that looked out over the desert. As is often the case when one goes to “an event,” I lay in bed with a busy mind, thinking of the three days to follow and what might be expected of me. And then the moon rose over the desert, and all thoughts of the retreat vanished. The next evening, after a day spent in workshops and discussions, we were sent out in the early dark to write in our retreat journals. What we were assigned to do doesn’t matter (I’ve never been very good at doing what I was assigned to do) - I stood at the gate of the House, looking out across the desert at that moon, again low and silver in the sky, and wrote in my journal: “THIS is what magic is.”
There was an awful lot of magic in that trip, but nothing quite so powerful as the magic of the place itself. I bring this up, and take so much time with it, because of one of the lessons I learned there that helped me a great deal as a writer. I was there to train in a process called “formation,” - it is a technique normally used by spiritual advisors, but a wise and wonderful man had the notion that many of the methods could be effective for teachers, and he, along with a few others, founded a movement to bring formation strategies into education. One of the techniques used in that work is something called “the third thing.” In a conversation, or a counseling, or a guidance session - or a lesson - there is one person giving, another receiving, and, in formation work- a “third thing” around which they build their thoughts and relationship. It can be a poem or a story or an object.
We trained in ways to bring this idea into the classroom, to make the things that we offer to the students for learning a “third thing,” a focus for the interaction, rather than an end in themselves. It is very much like the idea of a catalyst, or something that provides catharsis. In the process, though, I came to value “third things” in my process as a writer.
It is quite different than finding inspiration - when we are waiting for inspiration, we are waiting for the thing that strikes us with fire to write. It can be a long wait. The “third thing” process is active. Using a “third thing” as a writer means you reaching out to find that thing, and to take it in. You focus all your attention on it, and open your mind to what it may mean to you, at this moment, in your process or in your learning. What, you may ask, is the right third thing, and how would I ever find it? To quote my old Zen teacher - it is what is right in front of you.
That night, in the New Mexico desert, the place itself became a third thing for my writing - an opening to a beauty I’d never anticipated, and a willingness to be humbled by it. Today, the writing of this piece became a third thing for my writing, as the consideration of those magical desert nights brought back another memory that keyed, for me, the heart of a character that had been eluding me. It was like silver light on the floor of the desert.
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For more information on formation strategies and third things, See:
To Know As We Are Known, by Parker Palmer
The Courage to Teach, by Parker Palmer
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