Spend enough time in New Mexico and your mind just might slip out from underneath you. Imagine you’re driving south on I-25 from Santa Fe to Socorro, a way out there town. The road will change periodically but imperceptibly. In an hour you’ll pass through Albuquerque, where the exits that lead down into the city have names like Coal Avenue and Lead Avenue.

After another hour or two, clusters of green forest will dot the open desert in perfect, thin strips — this is the Bosque. Yellow lines will stretch the road way out while the land dips into a wide bowl, an ancient ocean. Now drive until you feel like there’s nowhere left to go and that’s when you’ll be arriving. Stark trees on the side of the road are desert freaks; with trunks that are bent over like old women’s backs and branches that reach up in wild gestures to outer space, they stand for no reason at all.

Around the turn of the century, the poet Rainer Maria Rilke exchanged letters with a younger disciple. Rilke’s letters of response are collected in the book Letters to a Young Poet. Rilke thinks a lot about solitude, to him it was something inherent to our nature. Says Rilke, “…this is fundamentally not something that we can choose or reject. We are solitary. We can delude ourselves about it, and pretend that it is not so. That is all. But how much better it is to realize that we are thus, to start directly from that very point.”

I bring this up because I was recently asked why New Mexico (a place I visit often because of family) has historically attracted artists. For me, the attraction to this particular place has always been something about undefinable terms — the mystery of the desert, light, space — in other words, magic. But I think the attraction of New Mexico makes a good case for Rilke’s point.

New Mexico feels feminine.

The relationship between land and sky is held in exact and chaotic proportions. The vastness of the dust-colored ocean bottom is unchanging, hard, slow, but the sky is wild and emotional, yielding streaks of color like violet and satin pink. This combination makes the landscape both still and expansive, and so all paths are given a wide birth — wide enough to forget and, therefore, to forgive. The sunsets cast the strangest, most particular light I’ve experienced anywhere, and sometimes darkness and light co-exist, making you feel like you’re standing on top of a disco ball.

In more concrete terms, New Mexico is the “high” desert — Santa Fe, for example, is 7,000 feet above sea level and, therefore, gets four real seasons, but very little rain. A third of the state is covered by The Great Planes and another portion, the Rocky Mountains. But despite the mountains that jut out, mostly the land is flat, and an isolated electrical storm can be seen from clear across the state.

The emptiness of the desert is revealing and ordinary things become events: a flash of light and the motion of rain 80 miles away, a giant, white, billowing cloud hanging low in the sky, a tree standing wild and alone on the side of the road. The desert will make you a witness. But bear witness and you will find recognition. At first it can be sad to imagine life alone, but I think Rilke had it right, and if he were still around, maybe he could explain better why the old lady trees near Socorro are so comforting.