Happy Winter Solstice to you all! I want to thank you for another year of caring about the work I do, of being on this newsletter list, of reading what I write and participating in workshops and other programs I offer, and of giving me the gift of service to you all. After a very rocky year and a half of destabilzing uprooting from the home I’ve raised my daughter in for 17 years, after nine months of living temporarily in the wonderful town of Forestville, California, near the Russian River, Jeff and I have finally landed in our new home near Bodega Bay, in West Sonoma County, and my daughter is home with us for the first holiday season after her first semester at Pratt Institute in NYC.
So I’m happy. This transition has been one of the hardest transitions of my life, right up there with losing my father and then my mother. With my daughter flying into her beautiful individuated life, with my housemate of 15 years moving back to the East Coast to be closer to her family, and with my home now down to the studs, getting gutted to be turned into a corporate retreat center for my landlord’s business, and with no other place to live available in my beloved Muir Beach, I’ve felt deeply displaced, unsettled, ripped from the Muir Beach land that has been my longest intimate relationship.
I didn’t realize how “placed” I had felt until I felt dis-placed. Feeling placed snuck up on me slowly. Over the years, I learned every plant that grows in Muir Beach, ever blossom and when it peeks its head through the earth- every daffodil and where they grow every season, every lupine, every field of California poppies, every naked lady with her bare brown stems that come up months after her greenery photosynthesizes. I knew every animal, where the fox dens live and when they have little foxy babies, every deer mama and coyote papa, every bobcat and whale that blows as it passes north and south along our shores.
I knew where all the edible plants on the land grow, and during the lockdown of the pandemic, we spent weeks eating nearly just that. I knew when to harvest what and which tree the owl sleeps in before hunting at dusk. It occurred to me at one point during my journey to being “placed” that this was a very Indigenous thing, something I had never had in my life or fully understood until it was ripped away from me so suddenly and against my will.
I knew Mount Tamalpais as my sacred mountain father, who I woke up to every morning out my window. I knew the Muir Beach and Stinson Beach ocean as my mother. I knew the bones of the animals who had deceased in Muir Beach around the bone circle in the eucalyptus grove as my ancestors, along with the bones of my pets and the ashes of my parents that I sprinkled in my backyard along the labyrinth there. I knew this land as the place where I was a mother and watched my child grow from a toddler of 3 to a nearly 20-year-old now, come January 6.
After all of my research into Indigenous healers for my book Sacred Medicine, I came to realize that this sense of being “placed” is very Indigenous. Most of us have lost that medicine, but I’ve been lucky to find it, even though Muir Beach is on the unceded land of the Coastal Miwok, and it doesn’t belong to my ancestors or me. My ancestral land is foreign to me, but this land has been home, even though it was built upon the tragedy of colonization.
All of that history has changed for me now. My grieving the loss of my Muir Beach home and its people and land and the moving on into adult life of my daughter has been as hard as the grief of a death. It has hit me in waves that contract my heart like I’m laboring. Grieving all this at the same time as I am grieving the loss of democracy in my country has taken my breath away. Just as one must breathe and then push during labor, I have struggled to breathe when the contractions hit me, but I have been committed to pushing in my activism, nevertheless, because now is not the time to give up the resistance of fascism and authoritarianism, no matter how much my personal grief might take my breath away.
But little bits of light are on their way as the solstice approaches for those of us in the Northern Hemisphere, as the darkest days come towards us, with the promise of every day being just a bit longer after the solstice. I always find that promise hopeful, even during the darkest times.
I feel the emergence of lightness of being entering me, too. We just finished unpacking the boxes, moving 17 years’ worth of things we tried to downsize, while also incorporating Jeff’s possessions. This is the first home Jeff and I have moved into that is not mine, nor his, but ours. We are getting to play house together, to treasure hunt at consignment shops and estate sales, to find our own decorating taste for the 1870s renovated barn we are now calling home. It is starting to feel like a home, with all of mine and my daughter’s art hung on the walls, and all of our old and new belongings gracing the hayloft and high-ceilinged main rooms that still have hoof prints on the baseboards.
But it is strange here too. I feel shy on this new land in West Sonoma. Like a new lover who doesn’t know the curves of someone’s fresh body, I feel awkward and unfamiliar in my new place. Although the land is similar to Muir Beach, being 1 ½ hours north on Highway One. I recognize the plants and animals, the tidal flats that stream in and out all day. In Forestville, I was in the forest. I could not see the sky, and I was far from the ocean, so I lost track of the moon cycles and the tidal schedules. But now, I am so far from San Francisco that I can see the Milky Way from my new backyard hot tub, and I know exactly where the moon is in its cycle and when low tide is at Dillon Beach, where my dog can run off leash among the sand dunes around Tomales Bay.
I am learning where the tide pools are during the very low tides, where the colorful starfish get exposed, and the urchins grab my finger with their sticky tentacles when I reach down to caress them. Like I learned to harvest oysters when Jeff and I lived in Cape Cod, I will learn how to harvest mussels and kelp here and maybe even get a fishing rod so I can join the men who catch Dungeness crabs with their hookless poles from the beach. I am getting to know the tule fog that blanketed us for the past month and just lifted, allowing the temperatures to warm just a bit.
Becoming “Placed”
This winter solstice, I invite you to check into how placed or displaced you feel. If you are displaced, maybe it’s time to go on a few dates with the land that supports and holds you. Here are a few gentle ways to do that—offered not as prescriptions, but as invitations.
You might start simply by noticing how your body feels where you live. Do you exhale when you arrive home? Do your shoulders drop when you step outside? Or do you remain braced, vigilant, unmoored? The nervous system often knows long before the mind does whether it feels held by a place.
You might begin to learn the names of what lives around you, as well as the names of the people who originally inhabited your land. Not in a performative or romanticized way, but in a relational one. What trees share your block? What tribe tended this land? What birds sing at dawn where you live? What weeds insist on growing through cracks in the sidewalk? What is the name of the bay you live near, or the lake you swim in, or the mountain out your window? Naming is a form of respect. It says, I see you. I am willing to know you.
You might mark time by something other than the clock or your calendar. Notice when the light shifts in your kitchen in late afternoon. When the fog rolls in—or lifts. When the first rain changes the smell of the soil. When the moon makes it harder or easier to sleep. These are ways the land speaks, quietly, constantly.
If you are grieving a land you loved—or a home that held you through an important chapter—know that this grief is legitimate. In our culture, we don’t often recognize place-based grief, but your heart does. You are allowed to mourn a mountain, a shoreline, a backyard, a view. You are allowed to miss a place the way you miss a person.
And if you feel deeply displaced—by moving, by climate change, by economic pressure, by colonization’s long shadow—be gentle with yourself. Displacement is not a personal failure. It is a collective wound. One many of us are carrying, often without language for it. Still, even within that truth, a relationship is possible.
You can sit on the ground and let your body be in contact with the earth beneath you.
You can offer gratitude—out loud or silently—to the water you drink, the food you eat, the shelter that holds you.
You can ask the land, humbly, how do you want to know me? How can I belong here without owning you?
You can make offerings to the land- flowers, songs, little altars under trees or on beaches, the way so many cultures do. (There are many instructions for doing this in my book Sacred Medicine, as well as in a blog I wrote Sacred Reciprocity.)
Belonging to land does not mean possession. It means reciprocity, care, and listening. Showing up again and again, even awkwardly, even shyly, even unsure.
As the wheel of the year turns and the light begins its slow return, may this solstice be a threshold for you, too. A moment to honor what you’ve lost, what you’re learning, and what might still be possible. Wherever you are, may the land beneath your feet come to know you.
And may you, in time, come to feel known by it.
Happy Winter Solstice, dear ones!
*In 2026, I will be offering one day or weekend IFS-informed mentoring intensives, one-on-one with me on this new land I am getting to know. If you’re interested in learning more, just send your interest to [email protected]. Part of the intensives, should you wish to experience it, will be land-based rituals that allow for a deeply somatic experience of whatever it is you are calling in, letting go of, or dreaming into being.
