The Arid Wellspring

Condensing invisible nourishment for myself and others

When I left a city in hopes of co-creating a more nourishing life and environment for myself, it was always important for me to share this with others as well. I had to learn to share in healthy ways though.

In a world that often feels like a desert, parched for nourishment, I had spent a lifetime over giving, over pouring and it led to disease, to anxiety and depression, to emotional instability and to feeling like I could never do enough to help those around me. Spending time in the desert showed me something miraculous though. Many of the plants in the desert rely on nothing but moisture from coastal fog to survive periods of drought lasting up to two years. They capture it in their branches, and as it forms into bigger and bigger droplets, it falls beneath and wets the sand for themselves and all the plants around them. They receive and share and it is what sustains them. It is miraculous.

It has made me wonder how to tap into this way of life - one that teaches me to take only enough, to share lots and doesn’t leave me depleted. Through much observation and plenty of experimentation, there have been several things I learned along the way.

To give freely, without expectation, the giving has to be from a place of overflow, not a place of sacrifice. That is how it becomes sustainable. It is also how it feels light to receive. In Mexico, I have met some of the most generous humans in the world. There is a saying that a Mexican will give you the shirt off his back and while this sentiment is beautiful in theory, if we all do that, in the end everyone with a generous nature ends up naked.

What I have found fascinating as well, is the things I have been most grateful for and that others have appreciated most from me, none of them really cost the person sharing anything at all.

The other thing I learned is that giving feels good when the connection is reciprocal. I don’t mean transactional. I don’t mean sharing only when we get something material that we deem to be of a fair value in return. I mean reciprocal where there is an energy exchange, a connection between two people that goes deeper than someone needing something and someone having that thing to give. Whether it is in an established relationship or exchanging smiles with a stranger out on a walk, sharing something with a stranger in need, or even just lending an ear to someone who has no one to talk to, it feels effortless to do that in those situations when there is a recognition of two souls, a willingness to truly connect, if only for a moment.

Currently I’ve started to build a space for myself in Mexico, in ways that nourish the land I am building on, a co-creation with nature that takes care of me as much as I take care of it. It has passed the first test - an extremely heavy rainfall, even for a place known for infrequent, but heavy rainfalls, after I put the foundations in place.

It is a space that will support me in living a life that nourishes not only my body but also my soul. It has been a plan for a while to also build a guest cabin on this plot and invite people to come experience it.

The point is not for others to see what I’m doing and recreate it, because my space is going to support my own passions, my own unique strengths and the kind of life that makes me come alive. The point is to see possibilities outside of the realm of what we consider reality. The point is to experience the feeling of an environment created to support us in living a life that helps us meet our needs, is aligned with our individual core values, our mission and purpose in this life - a life where the desirable choice is the easy choice every single time. Where wellness is a byproduct of living there, not one where wellness is something we have to fight for.

One of the gifts of a life in which I have had the opportunity to spend time in a large variety of environments over many years, including very consciously over the last five years or so, is that I have recognized patterns that I don’t ever hear being talked about. Some places allowed me to thrive in certain ways effortlessly and provided energy levels I haven’t experienced before. Others felt stifling, exhausting, even though they were beautiful and located in places that looked like paradise. I didn’t fully recognize the pieces of the puzzle and put them all into place until I started planning my own space and even more so, just now, as I work on my book. I have never experienced a place that has allowed me to thrive in all ways, to meet all my needs, but that is what I aim to create.

Often those who ‘return to the land’ recreate the pressure, stress and expectations of city life, creating a life that doesn’t allow for downtime, because even when there is technically time to rest, there is this weight of responsibility that constantly drains, this knowing of all the things that need to be done, like 50 open tabs constantly running in the background draining our battery, preventing true presence. When we have grown up in a world where to survive is to be useful, we struggle to learn to thrive, to allow others to see the worth we have when we are allowed to just be. Even when alone, we often perform, because to stop performing means to risk death to a nervous system stuck in survival.

We are shaped by our environments in young age, and unless we pause long enough to truly become aware of this, we then create environments that reinforce that shape, whether it is one that serves us or not. These environments then make it impossible for us to let go of the survival mechanisms that have kept us alive, by keeping us caught up in trauma patterns, coping mechanisms. They become a feedback loop that prevents us from thriving, they keep shaping us into the shape we have outgrown, and we can’t figure out what is wrong, why we aren’t more happy or more grateful or more relaxed, or more rested, telling ourselves that it is our lack of focus or discipline, and promise to try harder, find a better routine, or diet or workout plan.

We create what feels familiar unless we truly create consciously, so most people recreate the very stress they have tried to leave behind in a more natural setting, which simultaneously means they never truly benefit from authentic connection to nature even when they are right in it.

Life is meant to have both - action and stillness, and to experience both in an environment that supports that, allows that, gives us room to breathe, especially an environment where the actions are not merely doing things to look busy, but ways to intentionally connect more deeply to ourselves and everything around us. Suddenly life becomes a true immersive experience, not just one labeled that.

To come visit a place like this, is not a retreat away from life, it is an opportunity to step towards life - to dance with it, allow it to seduce us a little.

Spending time in a truly nourishing environment, it is an invitation to meet parts of ourselves that have spent a lifetime in hiding. To come more alive not through force, but to gently unfurl, bloom, like a flower in the presence of the sun.

I know that for this to happen, for people to benefit as much as possible from this experience, it has to be people I have an established relationship with, not just because like I mentioned already, reciprocity is important, but also because a certain level of trust is required for someone to come to a property in the middle of nowhere in a foreign country. Not only that, but to navigate the discomfort that is likely to come up.

That is the thing about being in a healthy environment at first, it feels uncomfortable to a nervous system used to struggle, stress, chaos, control. We often spend lifetimes recreating what feels familiar, because it’s more comfortable than uncertainty, even if the familiar path always leads us to comfortable misery. To truly experience a different way of being, to relax into it, a high level of trust is essential because we cannot drag someone into it, they have to want to meet us there. They have to step into the depths of what their emotions may ask them to navigate in that moment.

The thing about healing work, from that I have experienced as someone who has done a ton of healing in the last nine years - is that what I benefitted most from, was not someone trying to heal me. What I have benefited from, is someone loving me exactly as I am, and gently challenging me through things they enjoyed, an invitation into their world, their experiences, their environments and different ways of being that shifted things in me. Most of these things, I never would have tried on my own, because here is the thing about healing - we will avoid the things we truly need to do most to heal. Read that again. The things we need most, they often feel so uncomfortable, we would never choose them for ourselves. We will spend thousands of dollars on therapy, travel halfway across the world to silent retreats or to plant medicine ceremonies, but the activity or experience or connection that would truly reveal a new part of us to ourselves, we will often swear up and down that we just know we won’t like it. I would know. Hiking, camping, baking, cooking, building, writing a book - just a very short list of things I told myself I didn’t like and had no interest in that have completely changed the trajectory of my life. Having a Dogo Argentino, an orphaned horse, a love who is as passionate about horses as I am - even as someone who has always loved animals, these are all things I have said I would never do, didn’t want, that for some strange reason, I have needed to experience in this lifetime to heal parts of me that nothing else could have access to, nothing else was the right shape to touch, to reveal, but I was incredibly resistant to all of them. None of the things I have needed most I would have ever sought without an invitation from someone that something in me responded to despite the fear and it was based on trust.

Being invited into someone’s world, provided with a supportive environment through their own presence and the environment around them, it is some of the most potent medicine I have experienced. We can’t come into it with expectations though. Learning who we are, it is as much about learning what we do not like, as what we do. Sometimes it is just about allowing ourselves to do very little and rest for the first time in a lifetime. We have to be patient, stay out of the way and adjust as needed to find that happy medium where comfort and getting out of one’s comfort zone meet, that magical space where growth occurs almost effortlessly, and to do that one must have no agenda, just truly enjoying each other’s company. To do that, the person doing the inviting, the leading, they have to acknowledge they are as much as student as the person coming into that space.

There is also another piece of the puzzle. For this to actually have an impact, it cannot become a business. As soon as there is an expectation of healing, of transformation suddenly there is pressure on everyone involved. That pressure causes performance on both sides. The money exchanged for a promise causes a level of subtle disconnection that doesn’t always show up in other interactions, but does in this situation. It is why despite the growing number of healing retreats, healing modalities, not that much seems to change, often people just become desperate to seek more of these spaces, instead of trusting their own guidance. Because the version of healing we have been sold, it is actually just learning to cope better with the unhealthy environments we have grown accustomed to, it is why we always need more healing, why it has become a lifelong journey that never seems to get easier - because somehow the goal is always to shift ourselves, to make ourselves small, smooth enough, palatable enough, that we do not offend, that we do not cause friction, that if we just communicate better, then everything will be ok, that we have to learn not to take things personally, and just fly under the radar - excel, achieve, compete - but only in ways that have been outlined for us, largely through abandoning ourselves, overriding the wisdom of our bodies, our feelings and our intuition. That is not healing though. True healing is trusting in our own inner guidance over all else and trusting in our ability to change our lives so we no longer have to cope, but we need to be able to experience this to know it exists. It is not just something that our mind needs to hear, it is something that our body, our nervous system has to feel. The point is not to become simply more aware of what is happening in our internal landscape and keep reaching out to others to help us carry it differently. It is to put it down in a way that only a completely different environment, different activities, different way of being in the world can cause us to do, as we learn to build self trust, even for those short moments and to experience a sense of aliveness we may not be familiar with. Those contrasts, they begin to act as our guides to creating a more beautiful life. Because if we have never tasted the gentle sweetness of a soul nourishing tonic, we will keep drinking bitter poison, we will even seek it out, because it is all we know.

I also believe that everyone deserves equal access to opportunities that allow us to experience a different way of life. One that helps to unlock possibilities when we realize that beautiful experiences and most of the things that make up a beautiful life, they don’t have to be paid for. This is true for everyone, from those with very little money, all the way to those who have a lot, yet still worry that maybe it’s not enough (which, by the way, is almost everyone in our unnatural way of life that depends on money for everything).

At the same time, it is those struggling most who often have the least access to resources and would benefit most from seeing what can happen when we feel a pull of our soul and follow it, no matter how outrageous it sounds, no matter how unprepared we feel. That pull is there for a reason. When I set out on this adventure, I had nothing - no money, no guarantee, no security, just faith that a better way was possible. A safety net began to form when I started leaping into the abyss, but it only began to emerge after the first big leaps, not before. My little plot of land, the foundations on it, the dwelling that is beginning to take shape, they are physical proof that what I am saying is not just philosophy, not just theory, it is something I have experienced. It is hope.

On this entire journey, ordinary people helped me see my light, fuel my spark, guard it and feed it in moments I least expected it, in ways that feel like they have been designed especially for me.

It wasn’t always pretty either - some of the lessons I really needed to learn, they didn’t come packaged in a pretty box, instead they pricked the very spots where wounds I tried to ignore were festering. Just like when a cactus spike enters the body, often with a barb at the end that makes it impossible to remove, often we don’t feel it for a while. The body has to build up inflammation and puss around it, and only when we poke it directly, graze against it, do we feel the pain and we have to look at it, squeeze it despite the pain for the spike to be expelled from the body. Sometimes the same can be said for emotional wounds - we don’t see them until someone prods exactly in that spot that in an all too familiar way and we can become aware of it and squeeze it, purge it for good.

This is why contrasts are so important. Healthy, healing environments are beautiful, but it is only in experiencing the opposite and learning how to deal with it better, how to walk away completely or set crystal clear boundaries and pull back our energy, depending on what only we know the right choice is, that we truly heal. That is how we take our power back and then create what it is we want to experience more of in the world.

It doesn’t happen overnight either, some of the interactions, moments, experiences - it wasn’t until months later that I would fully understand how much of an impact they had on me, how much they stripped away to reveal the human who was underneath, how much more adaptable they made me. And all of them, they would build on each other, leading me back to myself, like little crumbs in the forest leading me back home.

While some of the people who have had a huge impact on me were those I met only once or twice, the people who have done the most have been those I have known a long time - those who loved me at my lowest, those who know how far I have come, those who have known me over different chapters and have chosen to be there and read them all. None of them are heroes or healers - just people who have cared about me, saw me, and offered something beautiful freely. This is why community matters. This is why community and healing cannot be commodified. They are not mere services - they are the base of what makes us human.

Even in cases healing came in an experience that was paid for -  like a dance lesson, a percussion workshop, a local Burning Man event, whatever the case may be - what these moments delivered was so much more than I ever paid for or could have hoped for in the moment. It came completely unexpectedly and it is why it was so impactful. I will always be grateful for the invitations that were extended my way, the ones that scared me, but due to a connection with someone that felt safe, I was brave enough to step towards. I will take any opportunity to pass that same beautiful gift on to anyone I can.

That is what a magical life is all about - learning to receive from unexpected sources and share from a place of overflow. I truly believe that the right investor or investors will want to be part of this project. In fact, I have already had two offers that came completely out of the blue, but showed me that others can see the value in this, not in mere return of investment in dollar amounts, but in something that cannot be quantified, but deeply matters.

One person, had the means and in fact wanted to give more than I needed, which I did not want (part of this project is challenging the notion that a lot of money is required to create a magical life), but wanted a level of control that I wasn’t willing to give up, so it was not quite aligned. The other person, has created most of the safety net that has allowed me to pursue this dream and while he is generous and would give freely, it wouldn’t be from a place of overflow - he would need to work longer and over give, so I had to tell him that as grateful as I am for all he has done, as much as that place in Mexico is going to be not only my home, but our home because it wouldn’t exist without him, I couldn’t say yes. A couple of others I have inquired with were extremely interested, but the timing wasn’t right for them. I have faith that the right opportunity will come along exactly when needed.

In nature there are species known as keystone species. They have evolved beautifully to play powerful roles in their environments that nourish them, while nourishing the world around them. For example fungi, building powerful networks that feed them, and give to everything around them. I truly believe this step of our evolution is asking humans to become a keystone species once again. At one point we were one, as Indigenous people the world over show us to this day, there were ways to thrive while helping our environment thrive with us. We don’t have to become anything more than we are. We just have to remember what we’ve forgotten.