Pie Town

Notes from the field, Cerrillos NM

Todd Joseph

Mar 22, 2026

I woke up last night at 3am in my RV.

No nightmares or anything like that. No sound outside of the usual obnoxious desert winds I’ve learned to tune out.

I’m hot. I’m cold.

Sweating a little, but also pulling up the blanket tighter anyway.

I don’t know why. Maybe it’s the juniper pollen. I think it wants to kill me. Juniper allergies do weird things to my brain out here.

Or maybe it’s just 3am being 3am.

And then my mind starts doing what it does. Just starts grabbing things.

Random.

Weird New Mexico town names.

Flying Saucer. Truth or Consequences.

It was Hot Springs. Which makes sense. The hot springs are actually worth going to. But they changed it in the 50s for a game show.

Like, imagine committing to that.

Your whole town just deciding, yeah, this is who we are now.

Truth or Consequences.

No going back.

Fifty years later and they’re still living with that decision. Respect.

And then, for whatever reason, that turns into me thinking about identity.

Which feels aggressive for 3am.

But the brain doesn’t check the clock. So here we are.

We all do this at some point. Decide who we’re done being.

Same kind of thing, right? Committed to a new identity… or just insomnia?

This is who I am now.

And then my brain goes to another one. Pie Town. Which might be the strangest name of all. But also somehow the most accurate.

Pie Town.

Middle of nowhere.

One of the least populated states in the country, in one of the least populated counties, and there’s just… a town called Pie Town. Nobody named it ironically. That’s just what it is.

There’s almost nothing there. A few dozen people, dirt roads, high desert stretching in every direction like the land forgot to stop. And a place called the Pie-O-Neer.

Which is either brilliant or completely ridiculous.

Probably both.

I’ve always loved going to Pie Town. Twenty-mile detour on the back way to Tucson. The Continental Divide Trail runs through it, so every now and then long-distance hikers stagger in. Wrecked. Hungry. A little feral. Looking for resupply.

What they find is pie.

I always talk about doing the Continental Divide Trail. Serious hiking. And then every time I get close to actually starting, I’m already tired. And I don’t. Every single time.

A good buddy of mine did it. Ended up in Pie Town.

He came off the trail, went into the Pie-O-Neer, hit it off with the owners. He was going to camp across the street. They gave him a cot in the office instead.

Worked making pies for a season.

Which feels like either derailment or enlightenment. I’m still not sure which. Might be the same thing.

Now I’m thinking about blueberry pie.

Maybe it means something. Or maybe I just need better sleep.

At least it’s not the bills.

But mostly I’m just awake at 3am. Shaking a little. No idea what to do with any of it.

Allan Hobson, Harvard psychiatrist, spent decades studying what the brain actually does at night. His conclusion was that the sleeping brain is constantly generating signals, then trying to make them mean something. He called it “making the best of a bad job.”

Which means Pie Town might be exactly that. A random signal my brain grabbed and built a story around.

But Antonio Damasio, neurologist, in Descartes’ Error, goes a different direction. The body registers and signals before the conscious mind has language for it. What feels like random sensation can be the body flagging unfinished emotional material. The shaking. That’s not necessarily juniper pollen. Might be something unresolved trying to surface.

If Hobson’s right, it’s noise getting organized. If Damasio’s right, it’s signal trying to surface.

Then there’s Matthew Walker at UC Berkeley, in Why We Sleep.

REM sleep, he says, is the brain’s overnight emotional processing system. The brain uses that window to work through what you didn’t finish. He calls it “overnight therapy.”

Jung talked about this too. The 3am wake-up as the unconscious demanding an audience. The ego’s been pushing things down all day. Now it’s asleep. So they come up.

Which means the 3am wake-up might be the system doing exactly what it’s supposed to do. Which is comforting for about ten seconds. Until I realize I can’t get to sleep because I’m thinking about pie.

Something is being processed. Moving through whatever it can find to get through. And for whatever reason, in the middle of the night, it picked this.

Pie Town.

Elias Howe was broke and stuck. Months working on a sewing machine that wouldn’t work. The problem was the needle. Specifically the eye of it. He knew what he needed. Couldn’t get there. Running out of money. Running out of time.

One night he fell asleep at his desk.

He dreamed he was in a strange country, captured by a king who gave him 24 hours to finish the machine or die. He worked in the dream the same way he worked awake. Desperate. Circling the same problem. Getting nowhere. The deadline passed. The king’s warriors came for him. As they marched him toward his execution, he noticed something. Every spear they carried had a hole pierced near the point.

He woke up at 4am.

Didn’t make coffee. Didn’t write it down. Ran straight to his workshop. By 9am he had a working needle with the eye at the tip. The thing that had defeated him for months, solved by a nightmare about being executed by a king he’d never met in a country that didn’t exist.

That’s the part nobody talks about. The delivery. The solution didn’t come from more effort or another long night at the bench. It came through a dream so absurd he probably would’ve laughed if he hadn’t been running to his workbench.

His brain already knew. It just needed him out of the way long enough to show it.

What is it about waking at this time? What if it’s more than just my jacked-up psychology?

The ancient Egyptians called it the sacred watch. Two to four in the morning. They believed this was when the membrane between the living and the dead was at its thinnest.

The early Christian desert monks built their entire prayer schedule around it. Vigils. Matins. They believed the soul was most permeable then. Whatever moves through spiritual terrain moves more easily in this hour than any other.

The Celtic Druids believed this as well. They called these hours caol áit. The thin places. Where the boundary between worlds quietly dissolved.

At a certain point it stops feeling like coincidence and starts feeling like I’m in over my head.

The Kabbalists scheduled prayer, Chatzot, right around 3am. The Zohar says that God roams the earth in the middle of the night, listening for human voices.

The Prophet Muhammad taught that this is when God descends to the lowest heaven and asks, who’s calling on me? Who needs something?

The yogic tradition calls it Brahma Muhurta. The hour of God. Ninety-six minutes before sunrise. The veil between individual consciousness and universal consciousness at its absolute thinnest.

Aboriginal Australians call it the Dreamtime. A living layer of reality running alongside this one. Deep night is when that layer becomes accessible.

In many Native American traditions, involuntary night waking isn’t insomnia. It’s a summons. Something wants your attention.

You didn’t wake up.

You were woken.

“In the middle of the night I suddenly awoke and could not sleep. And I lay there in the dark knowing that the whole world was praying.” - Thomas Merton

It’s 3am and I don’t really know if it’s God trying to get my attention or bad digestion from those red chili enchiladas and silver coin margaritas I had way too soon before I went to bed. Could be signal. Could be my brain. Could be something older than both.

Every tradition kept coming back to the same hour because something kept happening there that nobody could explain any other way. People kept waking up. They felt it. It didn’t come from thinking and didn’t feel like it came from inside them. That’s a lot of people agreeing on something weird at a very inconvenient hour.

If you’ve been there, you know what I’m talking about. Not fully awake, not fully asleep, usually just pissed off about it. You’re still moving. Not the one driving it.

And now neuroscience, annoyingly enough, is finding the same pattern.

At that hour your brain isn’t running the way it does during the day. Stuff you didn’t deal with starts moving. Emotions. Memory. Your system starts working on what you didn’t finish.

The ego goes quiet. You’re not managing yourself. You’re not trying to be anything. And there you are, awake long enough that rolling over feels wrong.

Something is there. Not a thought, not a feeling exactly. Whatever it is was there before you woke up and doesn’t need you to stay awake to keep going.

Maybe it’s trying to get through and I keep sleeping right through it. Or just ignoring it. It doesn’t feel like thinking. It feels like I keep walking past the same open door.

I’ve spent a lot of time trying to figure out what this actually is. As an ex-pastor, my default is still theological. But somewhere along the way it started feeling too small for what I kept running into at 3am. I haven’t found much to replace it with.

Except this. Theologian Paul Tillich said God isn’t a being among other beings. Not something out there you have to reach. God is the ground of being itself. The thing underneath everything. Not something you access. Something you’re already standing on.

The same thing receiving it is also the thing it’s happening through. Can’t cleanly separate the source from the receiver. Maybe it’s one thing felt from both ends.

A French Jesuit priest and paleontologist named Teilhard de Chardin spent his whole life circling something like this. He said consciousness and what we call God aren’t moving toward each other. It’s the same reality becoming aware of itself.

In those dark hours it starts to feel like something reaching through you. The Vatican tried to silence him for that one.

Quantum outlaw David Bohm called it the implicate order. He said underneath everything that looks separate, everything is actually connected. Before you notice it.

Jung called it synchronicity. When the hidden connection surfaces as patterns in your actual life that line up too precisely to write off as coincidence.

Which is a little bit too much to think about when you’re sweating in an RV trying to decide if you need water or therapy.

And here we are.

It keeps holding together no matter how you look at it. The hour. The way the brain shifts. The nervous system finishing what it started. The moment the sense of separation lets go. The consistency across every culture that ever paid attention to this. Everyone who chased it all the way down kept finding the same thing. Connection showing up as something remembered. Distance that was never what it looked like.

It’s a little too precise to be an accident.

You’ve probably dismissed it before. Rolled over. Told yourself it was just your brain doing weird things at a weird hour. Easier than admitting something found you while you were thinking about pie.

I don’t fully get what this is when it shows up. I’m curious. Something in all of this makes me feel recognized. There’s a longing I can’t explain. A sense that things are working themselves out in ways I can’t fully track.

But all of it keeps pointing toward trust. Because whatever designed this, the hour, the brain state, the ten thousand people across ten thousand years who felt the same thing. It feels pointed somewhere. Toward healing. Toward life.

And even when it shows up half awake, thinking about something as ridiculous as Pie Town, it doesn’t feel empty.

It feels like love.

It was Covid. We were designing the café.

My business partner and I kept circling this one design problem. There was a huge open space above the counter, between the kitchen and the service area, and nothing we came up with was right. We also had approximately no money, so whatever it was, we were building it ourselves. Two people who never run out of ideas. Both of us blank. Just sat there. Nothing.

That night I went to bed. Not even really thinking about it anymore. Thinking more about the lame to-go packaging from my Covid meal and the fact that everything’s closed and I’m home bored.

Woke up sometime around 3am. Randomly started thinking about a book I’d just finished a couple of weeks earlier. Russian novel. The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov. There’s a giant demonic cat in it named Behemoth. Size of a hog. Walks on two legs. Carries a pistol. Drinks vodka. Has a tommy gun. At one point someone tries to grab him and he looks up and says: Don’t touch me. I am a cat. And besides, I have papers.

I don’t know why that line was in my head at 3am. It just was. I fell back asleep. Great book by the way. You should check it out. That’s what inspired Mick Jagger to write Sympathy for the Devil.

Anyway. Woke up again. This time I was thinking about David Byrne singing Life During Wartime. Where he does that weird dance where his arms go loose like a barrel of monkeys in slow motion. Fell back asleep.

Woke up again. Thinking about a bumper sticker I’d seen.

My other car is in the arroyo.

Which if you hike the arroyos out here in New Mexico you know the experience. You’re out in the middle of nowhere and you just find a car. Nobody knows how it got there. Nobody’s coming back for it.

Next afternoon a friend walks over to the café holding her cat. A really fat one. It reminded me of Behemoth from The Master and Margarita.

She’s got a mask on. Because it’s Covid obviously. She’d figured out a way to do something human. She said she rented our friend’s movie theater across the street to show DVDs on the big screen. Like in a real theater before Covid. Invite only. Test yourself first. The whole ritual.

I said sure. Desperate to be anywhere. What’s the movie?

She goes, Stop Making Sense.

I told her that song had been stuck in my head since 3am.

While I’m there, another friend pulls me aside. Hadn’t seen him for a while. He’d inherited his grandfather’s place out near Española. Old woodmill. He says he’s trying to clean up the property and he’s got all these massive pieces of timber. Some of them thirty feet long. Thick. Heavy. Different sizes. Half buried in an arroyo. Been there for years. He needed to get rid of them. Did I want them. Could I use them for the café?

Giant. Heavy. Weird. Came out of an arroyo.

Of course I said yes before I finished the sentence.

Had no plan what we were going to do with them. One thing I learned as a maker. Anytime someone offers you anything weird like that you always say yes.

Eventually those pieces of timber became the installation above the counter. The thing that finally filled the one space we couldn’t solve. Hanging there like it shouldn’t work but does. People stopped and stared at it. The way you do when something has no business being beautiful but is. The write-ups called it unexpected and arresting. We even won the American Institute of Architects interior design award for it.

I don’t know what to call it either.

A talking Russian cat with papers. David Byrne losing his arms. A car nobody can explain sitting in the bottom of a dry riverbed. A friend with a cat and a mask. Timber buried for thirty years waiting for someone to say yes.

Didn’t make sense. Not at first.

I didn’t figure it out till weeks later because I was reading my dream journal. Yeah, I actually have a dream journal. Sometimes I want to remember if what I was thinking about in my sleep is weirder than the weird stuff I think about all day anyway. Most of the time It’s a tossup. Sometimes there’s insight. Sometimes not. Either way, it’s wild to see what the psyche does.

At the time it just felt like random nonsense. But my brain was doing something at 3am I wasn’t directing, and by the next afternoon the thing I couldn’t solve had solved itself through a chain of absurdity that had no right to connect.

Something else was running that errand. I still don’t know what. Still doesn’t fully make sense. It just… is.