Chasing the Ghost of D.H. Lawrence in New Mexico
By: Erik Rittenberry
In the magnificent fierce morning of New Mexico one sprang awake, a new part of the soul woke up suddenly, and the old world gave way to a new.”
― D.H. Lawrence
I’ve just come back from a solitary journey through the northern reaches of New Mexico—and my blood, I swear, is still humming with it. What a dreamlike place to wander and get lost for a few days.
The moment I set foot on that earth and began winding my way through the canyons, along the Rio Grande, past the clay-colored adobe houses, I felt something shift, as if the land itself had spoken. Now I understand why they call it the Land of Enchantment—it’s not a slogan, it’s a spell. It truly is.
The place overwhelms you.
Desert plains stretching like old songs, the sagebrush trembling in the breeze, red rock gorges that look carved by the gods, snowcapped peaks rising in the distance. And the people—Native, Hispanic, Anglo—woven into a single, living tapestry. It was elemental in its beauty, and it seized me. I was utterly in awe.
Why did I come to New Mexico?
Perhaps I just needed a break from the daily barrage of apocalyptic headlines—a hasty little escape from the radioactive divide of this disintegrating civilization. That’s part of it.
But really, I came for two things: to walk these wild, immaculate landscapes with my camera in hand, and to make a quiet pilgrimage up into the hills, about seventeen miles north of Taos, to the old ranch where D.H. Lawrence once lived and breathed and wrote.
Why D.H. Lawrence?
Lawrence has always held a kind of spell over me. I can’t fully explain it. But then again, can we ever truly explain what draws us to the people, places, and things we love?
D.H. Lawrence was a small man, a weak man, but he had a Herculean spirit. There’s something in his fire, his wild clarity, his remarkable gift of dramatic expression that pulls me in when I read him.
I’m not the only one. Henry Miller, too, was drawn to Lawrence’s “unquenchable, burning spirit, his totality, his ubiquitousness, his aliveness.” He once said that “Lawrence on his deathbed had more life than most men have in their moments of highest ecstasy, if ecstasy there be in the world anymore.”
Tennessee Williams, too, was fascinated by Lawrence, so much so that he wrote a play about him. He believed that Lawrence’s philosophy was the “richest expressed in modern writing.”
As for me, I love Lawrence’s poetry and essays more than his novels, although I like his novels too. His non-fiction writings are like a radiant beacon in the endless storm of life. He understood more than most the paradoxical nature of human beings, the eternal conflicts, the battle between life-affirming forces (instinct, passion, sensuality, intuition) and death-dealing ones (intellect, repression, social convention, industrialism).
Lawrence, in almost all his writings, was a fierce critic of the mechanization of humans in modern civilization. He despised what he saw as the deadening effects of industrialization and modernity. He believed that modern society, through its technology, routines, and rational systems, had severed humanity from the deeper, more elemental sources of life.
In his eyes, the modern individual was becoming a thing, a cog in the machine, living by intellect and lost in a “fog of abstraction,” drained of instinct, mystery, and soul.
“The great masses of people...are perfectly content to be part of a vast mechanism. The individual is of no more importance than a cogwheel in a machine.”
— D.H. Lawrence
These sentiments resonate with me deeply, which is probably why I keep coming back to Lawrence. He speaks to that wild, irrational part of the soul—the primordial, untamed shadow that too much civilization tries to snuff out. For Lawrence, the spirit wasn’t just neglected—it had been offered up, sacrificed on the cold altar of the intellect.
“The final aim is not to know, but to be.”
Like Lawrence, I don’t buy the notion that we’re here to shuffle along as obedient little cogs, grinding away, endlessly consuming nonsense, and bowing down to the very technology and machines we’ve built to serve us. That’s not where it’s at.
I believe we’re meant to be pioneers of life, “adventuring onward into the unknown,” living out whatever it is that burns inside us—that strange, private passion that makes us feel most alive.
Lawrence writes: “We can't go on as we are. Poor, nerve-worn creatures, fretting our lives away and hating to die because we have never lived.”
He warned that the blind worship of progress, science, and intellect was producing emotionally numb, spiritually impoverished people—what we might now call the “spiritually dead.” Many of his novels are riddled with characters trapped in this sterile world, longing to break free and to live as far as they can by their “own soul's conscience.”
“It is life we have to live by, not machines and ideals. And life means nothing else, even, but the spontaneous living soul which is our central reality. The spontaneous, living, individual soul, this is the clue, and the only clue. All the rest is derived.”
— D.H. Lawrence
Threaded through all of Lawrence’s writings is the understanding that the “human soul itself is the source and well-head of creative activity.”
His words aren’t polite, and they’re not always easy to take in—but that’s what I love about his writings. They’re an honest cry, raw and urgent—a call to rip ourselves free from the dead machinery we’ve let run our lives and to find our way back to something real, something alive, and to reclaim the full measure of who we are.
He came close to finding this austere vitality in the American Southwest.
Taos offered a counterpoint to modern Europe's overbuilt, over-rationalized world. The desert was elemental—it demanded presence, surrender, humility. Nature, to him, was not just beautiful, but essential for reawakening the human spirit.
D.H. Lawrence’s Arrival in New Mexico
D.H. Lawrence came to Taos in 1922, lured by the curious and tempestuous Mabel Dodge Luhan—a wealthy arts patron with wild eyes and a fierce love for the high desert.
She was a mix of mystic and meddler, maddening one moment and magnetic the next. But she saw something in this crude, sunlit land and its native people. She wanted the world to see it, too. She believed Lawrence, with his volcanic spirit and gift for truth, could put it into words—could make others feel what she felt.
In one of her letters, she pleaded with him—not just to write, but to reveal:
“Won’t you use your great genius at this time to help get something out to the world that will help to make people more conscious of the Indian genius?”
She wanted him to help awaken the world to the soul of this place, to the ancient rhythm still pulsing in the Pueblo earth.
Mabel made the arrangements for Lawrence and his wife’s journey to the Southwest. A bit hesitant at first, he finally gave in.
Lawrence came to Taos perhaps out of a little idle curiosity, but mostly it was a necessity. Europe was suffocating him. The First World War had drained the soul from its people, and everything felt overcivilized, stale, embalmed in thought. He needed air, freedom, and a rugged, unspoiled land.
He found it in New Mexico.
Shortly after arriving, Lawrence writes these words to express his complete awe of the place:
“There are all kinds of beauty in the world, thank God, though ugliness is homogeneous… But for a greatness of beauty I have never experienced anything like New Mexico…
The vast amphitheater of lofty, indomitable desert, sweeping round to the ponderous Sangre de Cristo Mountains on the East, and coming up flush at the pine-dotted foothills of the Rockies! What splendor! Only the tawny eagle could really sail out into the splendor of it all.”
Lawrence lived on and off at what is now called the D.H. Lawrence Ranch, a property given to Frieda, Lawrence’s wife, by Mabel Dodge Luhan. There, he wrote ‘St. Mawr’ and parts of ‘The Plumed Serpent’, both works that reflect his fascination with primitive life, spiritual regeneration, and the rejection of modern corruption.
To Lawrence, New Mexico was more than a place—it was a vision. “The moment I saw the brilliant, proud morning shine high up over the desert,” he wrote, “something stood still in my soul, and I started to attend.”
In Taos, he found a kind of sacred solitude, a confrontation with elemental forces that aligned with his lifelong quest for authenticity and rebirth. He once wrote:
“I think New Mexico was the greatest experience from the outside world that I have ever had. It certainly changed me forever. Curious as it may sound, it was New Mexico that liberated me from the present era of civilization, the great era of material and mechanical development.”
My Arrival at the Ranch
Almost a hundred years after Lawrence once lived here, here I am on a Thursday morning, driving up an old dirt road that leads to the legendary ranch. The weather was mild and sunny, and the blue skies stretched out to eternity. Upon arrival, I came up to the caretaker’s cabin and was greeted by an older gentleman who manages the ranch. He gave me a brief history and a map of the grounds.
I immediately made my way up a slope to the “Homesteader’s Cabin,” where Lawrence and his wife lived. It’s a three-room dwelling that was built in 1891. On the porch, a worn and ragged wooden bench where Lawrence used to sit on pleasant afternoons, gazing out at the alfalfa fields and the mountains beyond.
I couldn’t help seeing him there, his bearded face and eyes ablaze, his mind deep in thought, sketching sentences in a notebook. I took a seat there myself, looking out in the distance, trying to see what he saw and wrote about a century ago. To say it was surreal being there would be an understatement.
The Lawrence Tree
Now, the highlight of the trip.
Some twenty feet in front of the cabin is a towering ponderosa pine. Larwence was mesmerized by this tree, and it held deep significance for him. He wrote about it often. And here it was before me, in all its quiet dignity, reaching up to the heavens.
I ran my hand across its rough, ancient bark, knowing too that Lawrence had done the same so many years ago.
There’s a little bench beneath the tree where Lawrence used to sit and write. I sat there and gazed up at this mighty pine “that towers and hisses like a pillar of shaggy cloud, immense above the cabin”, and reminisced on the many words he wrote about this exact scene that my eyes were now witnessing.
Like I said, it was pretty surreal.
In his essay "Pan in America," Lawrence described the tree's essence: "The tree has its own aura of life. And in winter the snow slips off it, and in June it sprinkles down its little catkin-like pollen-tips, and it hisses in the wind, and it makes a silence within a silence. It is a great tree, under which the house is built."
Elsewhere, he writes: "The big pine tree in front of the house, standing still and unconcerned and alive...the overshadowing tree whose green top one never looks at...One goes out of the door and the tree-trunk is there, like a guardian angel."
In the summer of 1929, Georgia O’Keeffe came to the ranch, and like Lawrence, she fell under the spell of the mighty pine that stands like a silent sentinel over the place. She spent hours beneath it, stretched out on the same weathered bench where Lawrence used to sit and write, letting the branches speak to her as they once spoke to him.
From that low, reverent angle—looking up through the limbs into the star-pinned sky—she painted The Lawrence Tree. Not as the world sees a tree, but as the soul feels it: immense, protective, alive.
The tree became not just a subject, but a presence, an emblem of the eternal that hovers quietly over all true art.
O'Keeffe described her experience: "There was a long, weathered carpenter's bench under the tall tree in front of the little old house that Lawrence had lived in. I often lay on that bench looking up into the tree…past the trunk and up into the branches. It was particularly fine at night with the stars above the tree."
Conclusion
Visiting a place where one of your literary heroes once lived and wrote does something to you. The words they left behind, words written long ago, suddenly feel alive, as if they’re hanging in the air around you. For a moment, you catch a flicker of their mind at work, feel the pulse of their spirit in the walls, in the wind. It’s haunting yet beautiful in a way that’s hard to put into words.
Nearly a decade after Lawrence died from tuberculosis, in the autumn of 1939, Tennessee Williams found his way to Taos and met Frieda, Lawrence’s fierce and fiery widow. She took a liking to him, saw something kindred in the young playwright, and even offered him a piece of land on the ranch.
But he turned her down. Still, he stayed for a few days in the old cabin where Lawrence had lived and written. Three days was all he could manage. He left, saying the ghost of Lawrence—his presence, his shadow—was just too much. Too heavy. Too alive.
I think I understand.
So let me live that I may die eagerly passing over from the entanglement of life to the adventure of death as I turn beauty, to the breath, that is of new beauty unfolding in death. --D.H. Lawrence
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Beautiful! I've always felt that same love and appreciation of DHL -- his wild yearning spirit, never quenched by civilization and society.
Beautiful piece & a trip of my dreams ✨