It is a gorgeous November day here at 9,000 feet on my ranch in Creede, Colorado. There is snow up on Red Mountain, Bristol Head, and La Garita, but down here in my pasture a warm wind stirs the dried grasses, riles up the horses, who are still summer fat, and this week wearing bright orange neck gators in the hope that no hunter will mistake them for elk. This morning I donned a bright orange hat of my own and took my three Irish Wolfhounds, Mary Ellen, Fenton, and Rose, for a walk out to the homesteader’s grave that sits atop the highest hill on my property. The man who is buried there spent nearly sixty years on this ranch, the first ten in an 8’ X 10’ X 6’ log cabin, and the next fifty in one that was 10’ X 15’ X 8’, where he could actually stand up all the way. Old man Pinkney collected outhouses, and Canada geese, and when he went off to fight in WWII he couldn’t wait to get home to these mountains. He is no relation of mine, he died two years before I was born, and yet we are bound together by the power of this piece of ground, this fence line that we both have spent our days walking.

When I teach creative writing, I encourage my students to get out of their analytical brains. Our analytical brains are liars, I tell them. They trick us into getting out of bed each morning by assuring us that as long as we pay our bills and contribute to our 401K and get all our wood cut before winter we’ll be warm, safe, dry, healthy, happy and solvent. I tell my students to write instead with their intuitive brains, the brains that know all too well that things are NOT alright, that know that one day, maybe sooner than later, we and everyone we love are going to die. I implore them to write with the brains that are helplessly, breathlessly in love with the world: the shape of that mountain, the color of that columbine, the way the ocean makes a different sound in the dark than it does in the daytime, the way a horse picks up his tail before he trots across a field. I want them to write with the brains that are so in love with the world that the idea of leaving it makes them want to scream and scream.

It is this intuitive brain that lets us fall in love; it also attaches us to place. And in the same way we can’t predict or control who we love, we can’t predict or control which places get under our skin, which places we can’t give up, even when all logic advises us to. It is the reason why every time the wheels of a plane touch down in Colorado, my whole body relaxes. It is why, when I come driving over Slumgullion summit and Spring Creek Pass after a long stint away, and I get my first view of the upper Rio Grande valley, I start bouncing up and down in my seat. It is how I know that one day I’ll be buried here next to old man Pinkney, and how I know that place matters to me more than anything: to my writing, to my sense of well being, to my life.

Pam Houston is the author of Sight Hound and Cowboys Are My Weakness, among works of fiction and non-fiction. She is the Director of Creative Writing at UC Davis and was a keynote speaker at PLACEMATTERS06.