On Taos, Mulranny, and the Quiet Mystery of Recognizing Home

By Ernest L. Blumenschein –

There are places in the world that carry such a strong sense of identity that when we arrive, we don’t feel like visitors at all. We feel like returning.

Taos, New Mexico is like that for me. So is Mulranny, on the western edge of Ireland where the sea meets the boglands in a quiet, ancient conversation.

These places hold themselves with a kind of certainty. The land is layered with memory—geological, cultural, artistic, ancestral. You feel it in the air, the light, the way people move through their days. There is a coherence, a gatheredness, as though the place has been simmering itself down for centuries into something clear and undeniable.

When we step into such a place, something inside us recognizes that clarity. It’s as if a previously silent part of ourselves suddenly speaks up and says, Oh. Here. I know this.

This is different from nostalgia. Nostalgia is longing for something we remember. This is longing for something we have never remembered, but somehow always known.

Taos has that feeling. The Sangre de Cristo mountains rise behind the town like a presence, not a backdrop. They don’t frame Taos—they hold it. Even before I learned the stories of Taos Pueblo, the artists who came seeking mystery, and the long river of history flowing quietly there, I could feel it. There’s a strong connection to the San Antonio Art League here, too – many of the artists who are in the permeant collection of the Art League Museum were among those who began the Taos Society of Artists, founded in 1915.

Mulranny is similar, but in a softer, tidal way. There, the land whispers instead of declares. The beach stretches long and pale, seaweed and shells lining the tidemarks like messages. Every time I walk there, I feel I am being given something I once lost. Not returned in full—just enough to say, Keep looking. You are close.

Maybe this sensation comes from memory embedded in the psyche—our ancestors moving across continents, carrying landscapes in their bones. Or perhaps we simply recognize places that mirror the interior geographies we already carry.

Some of us have mountains inside us.
Some of us have coastlines.
Some of us have deserts.
Some of us have peat bogs and tide pools and drifting fog.

And when we find the physical counterpart to our inner landscape, it feels like home.

Last night, here in Taos, the idea revealed itself all over again. We stopped at a tiny wine bar tucked inside an old adobe building just off the plaza on Ledoux Street. The room was dim and candle-warmed, plaster walls worn smooth by decades of hands and weather. A traditional Irish band was playing—fiddle, guitar, bodhrán—music that rose and curled into the thick air like smoke. And there it was: Taos and Mulranny, braided together. The mountains outside, the sea in memory. Two places I love, both concentrated with history and spirit, appearing in the same breath of song.

We don’t need to live in these places to be shaped by them. Sometimes it is enough just to have stood there, breathed that air, walked that shoreline. They become part of our internal compass—a direction we can return to whenever we need to remember who we are.

We carry them with us.
Or perhaps—they carry us.

John O’Donohue
“Landscape is the firstborn of creation. It was here long before we ever arrived, and it will continue to be. When we walk on the earth, we are walking on the ancient body of our grandmother.”

I’ll be back home in San Antonio soon with Taos stories to tell, one that involves another “home” I found in Santa Fe that feels like it is in Japan.