"rappers always talk about back to the old school....you never should have left in the first place, fool"

So many people want me to come back to New Mexico, settle down, make change, have kids, bring something new.
This place makes me sad every time I come back. It is hard, coming from California-- a place that for me has meant constant change and growth and progress and healing. And then coming back to New Mexico, where I see the same things, the same patterns, the same darkness, slowness, oldness.
I love it, but it is a bittersweet love. I am always confused about this dual-living God has me on, taking me from Cali to Burque and back. Where do I belong, God? Why do i feel like a stranger in the place I grew up in? Why do they not understand me here? Or in Cali, for that matter?

New Mexico has those landscapes that are vast, cold and dark. Hundred mile plains and mesas, dotted with juniper bushes, brown grass and tumbleweed. They strike to your soul, revealing empty places and longings that you have been content to drown out by moving to a crowded, loud, fast, modern place like Los Angeles.
But when I come back, i hear them again. They speak to a place that is older in me than anything I know. In December, Albuquerque is a small city, surrounded by a high desert that is so cold and so dark. I remember going hunting in Corona with my dad one January when the ground was covered in snow and there was no light except for the stars. Looking out with frosty breath, I could feel the place pull on me...the utter silence, the smell of sage in the night. I was scared because I felt like it would never let me go, like it knew me better than i knew myself....that it would see through my ambition, my goals of leaving New Mexico and seeing the world and making my own life for myself. It did see through me. As did the Pecos mountains, the river valleys by Taos, the pueblos along the Rio Grande.

thats why i'm scared to go back even though i love them.

)))
then there are the homies. They are like blood to me, Jay and Anthony. It was always the three of us. Move back, they say.
"We'll start a movement, son--- remember how it was back in high school? B-boys rocking every weekend, graffiti at its peak, all the famous writers getting up, DJs getting out and finding all the dopest shit...We can make that again, bro! Our place will be the spot-- we'll work all day and then come back and it will be all about music-- making beats, listening to all the cool-out shit, throwing jams, perfecting styles, talking for hours about hip hop, music, culture. We'll be unstoppable.."

sometimes i think about what it would be like. It is tempting. But for real though- me and God got thangs to do...