IF MONEY HASN’T FALLEN FROM THE SKY, you’re not a trust-funder, or your skills or talents are not appropriately rewarded in the marketplace, just exactly how are you supposed to live in Santa Fe, where the cost of housing and other necessities spirals more and more out of control?
Well, this is how Austin does it: She works in a retail store, she teaches yoga, she exercises horses, and she manages real estate. And on the side, as a single mom, she co-handles the care, feeding, education, and inspiration of her five-year-old daughter.
How does she do it? By doing all of it. And she does more than just accept this complicated life – she actually loves it.
The “Santa Fe shuffle” is the idea that you have to do many different things to keep your head above water here. You teach yoga, you work with horses, you manage real estate. What else?
Retail, hospitality, the service industry, restaurants. And nannying – that’s always a good one in a place like this. I guess I have done a lot of things. Santa Fe is a place where there are a lot of jobs and not a lot of careers.
It’s a place where – if you want to live here and you love living here – you have to be able to adapt and utilize the opportunities that come your way.
Because, what do they call it, “The Land of Entrapment”? But it can also eject you. There are a lot of people who get ejected from here, especially young people.
That’s partly because it’s super expensive here. But on the flip side, the best things here are always free: sunsets, trails, dog walks. And here they’re in such abundance. We’re like a Michelin star for the best free stuff.
You are a yoga teacher.
I think of yoga like I think of therapy. If you say to someone, Yeah, I do therapy, it doesn’t say anything about what you’re actually doing. It’s a vague umbrella statement that has a whole lot of stigma attached to it. To say, I do yoga, is like saying, I do therapy.
I was watching a Jonah Hill documentary that he did on his therapist. I’ve been in therapy on and off my whole life, but I was watching with someone who had never been and had this idea of therapy as a place you go to pay someone a lot of money to talk about your feelings and have them go, How does that make you feel? That’s not really what therapy is. That’s what cotton-candy-Twinkie-junk-food therapy is. And that’s fine. There’s a place for that. Any place is a good place to start.
But to really let that process work on you is something that you don’t understand until you really get into it. Yoga is also like that. To actually let the practice work on you – that’s something you don’t understand until you’re in it.
When therapy is great, it’s great. But when it’s crap, it’s totally worthless. Worthless at best, degrading at worst. Yoga is like that too. Cotton-candy yoga might be really fluffy and seem nice. But once you get down to it, there’s literally nothing there. You get the cotton candy wet, and it disappears. It’s just empty. And it can hurt your body.
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