Some places need no justification. They simply are, and so is our love for them.
I could tell you about the Blue Hole in Santa Rosa, New Mexico—that improbable sapphire set into the high desert like a jewel forgotten by Neptune himself. I could describe how it appears as if the earth were wounded, and instead of blood, it bled something older, colder, clearer. Water that has waited a hundred years to surface, perfectly filtered and indifferent to the dust storms above. But even if I did all that—painted it in words, mapped its depth, measured its temperature—I’d still fall short of explaining why it matters. Why it matters to me.
Geologically, blue holes are collapsed limestone caves, formed over millennia by the slow dissolution of rock and the patient carving of time. Most are coastal sinkholes, briny and vast, like Dean’s Blue Hole in the Bahamas or the Great Blue Hole off the coast of Belize—sites for divers and dreamers alike. But Santa Rosa’s Blue Hole is inland, an artesian spring, one of several in a network of underwater caverns still being charted. It’s 81 feet deep, 60 feet across, and shockingly, impossibly blue. Not turquoise, not aquamarine. Blue. True blue. The kind of blue that belongs on church ceilings and stained-glass windows. Sacred blue.
The first time I saw it, I didn’t say a word. I just stared. The desert around it looked faded and tired, bleached by wind and time. But there in the middle of all that tan and dust and dry grass was this pool—alive, glimmering, breathing. People were swimming in it, their laughter bouncing off the rocks. Teenagers, old men in rash guards, little kids in floaties—all pulled toward it, like moths to a strange, blue flame. You don’t have to understand it to love it. That’s the point.
And maybe that’s what makes a place sacred. Not ritual or religion, not elevation or fame. But resonance. You stand near it and you feel something. Like the earth is whispering in a language you once knew, and for a brief moment you remember. It doesn’t need to make sense. It doesn’t need a guidebook or a plaque. Some places don’t ask for attention. They ask for reverence.
There’s no explaining the love for a place like that—not really. You can say it's beautiful, sure. Or rare. Or geologically significant. But none of those things capture the lump in your throat when you arrive or the ache in your chest when you leave. The only way I can put it is this:
Somewhere in the middle of New Mexico, the ground opened up, and instead of swallowing the sky, it decided to reflect it.
And I’ve been in love with it ever since.