You Belong Here

A Lamentation for Land

I come back to California a prodigal daughter.

I have returned several times to my former lands since my formal exodus to the East Coast during Covid – but this time I’m closing out a seven-year cycle, one that began when I first sat with ayahuasca. With several heavyweight planets shifting their heavenly bodies over the past several months, it is passage that invites both beginnings and endings.

My life is alive with the rotting, the rooting, the readying.

I leave DC for two weeks sensing that my time away will do some essential sifting for me naturally; traveling always helps me turn over the inner compost heap.

Los Angeles is a breath of fresh air for someone starved for a scenery change. I land in her clutches like a brand new baby and make my way in my rental car to Topanga Canyon, the legendary hippie enclave surrounded by the sprawling Santa Monica Mountains. Driving into the canyon it’s hard to comprehend that only six months ago the Palisades wildfire leveled 23,448 acres after burning for 24 days.

I expected to find an alien landscape, a once-familiar area now unrecognizable.

And yes, there is a dark aftermath that’s difficult to look at – whole swaths of oceanfront homes that have been incinerated, long swallowed up by an ocean that’s now too toxic to swim in. The only evidence that someone lived here, that these million-dollar homes ever existed are stacks of burnt pilings licked clean by the waves. Now drivers on the PCH can once again peer at the ocean uninterrupted. Across the street: torched cars rusting next to bent wires and collapsed rebar piles, charred palm trees, a constant police presence barricading entrance to what used to be a neighborhood.

It’s all quite human and gruesome. That is, until I turn into the canyon and am suddenly reminded how quickly nature rebounds. The flowering hides of the towering mountains are a shock to my eyes, as is the verdant spread of green covering them like a second skin. Unless you lived here and witnessed firsthand the fast-moving walls of flame, you would never guess that this area had almost been wiped off map. Unless, of course, you squint and realize that all the trees are now black.

I am no stranger to these strange landscapes.

The body never forgets certain kinds of terror; a form of branding that leaves its mark invisibly, etched into the nervous system. Like that one hot August night when a lightning storm rolled in over the forested mountains of Felton where I lived before leaving Cali for good. 11,000 lightning strikes ignited a complex of epic proportions, setting ancient redwoods ablaze so much that I had to evacuate the area for several weeks. You have a different relationship with nature after you’ve tangled with her fangs, her danger.

I will never smell smoke on the wind again and not shudder.

I hike into the burn scars to leave offerings for the spirits of this place. Topanga. Where the mountain meets the sea. The air is thick with smell: honey and sunbaked stone, pollen and earth. Thousands of tiny hot blue dragonflies. I pour gin and sprinkle tobacco, then touch a rock with my thanks and immediately begin to weep. I don’t know what’s come over me, but whatever grace is flowing through this land begins to sing.

You belong here.

I suspect we have all felt this call of longing at one time or another – a yearning for a place that feels like home. As someone who has felt like an outsider instead of an insider for much of my walk, a community that can hold all of me has often eluded my reach. The places I imagined to be my soul homes have ironically denied me. My story of belonging has never fit into a cute definition as much as I wished it would, for most of the cities that I’ve wound up in were for reasons far beyond my limited vision.

For instance, I never dreamed of making it big in Los Angeles. I saw myself somewhere else – like New York City – and so resisted its allure when I first visited on a long solo roadtrip in 2011.

I convinced myself that this obscene metropolis, humming with cars and energy, was definitely not on the list of places I could live – but once there, she literally wouldn’t let me leave. I found myself intoxicated and dazzled and bewildered by how quickly I let her claim me. I found myself enjoying my love/hate relationship with the enormity of this raw, weird, glittery, insane city. I ended up staying in LA for six years and by the time I left to begin my next chapter, the essence of this delirious landscape had imprinted itself on me forever.

Another kind of burn scar I have known.

You belong here.

These words echo in my head like a mantra for the rest of the day and then for the rest of the week. Each time I call forth this mantra, I am moved to tears. As I drive LA’s sinuous highways to visit all my friends, I reflect on all the ways that I have been held by this place. How my identity has been shaped by its majestic and terrifying landscape just as much as its shit-strewn concrete.

When I was a young woman lost and wandering without community, without a plan, this land called forth my deep remembering. This land extended a hand in the form of a friend who initially invited me to visit and then welcomed me completely. This land became my first soul home to claim me after so many years of feeling unwanted and unseen.

I planted many seeds of myself here and now this soil holds my stories.

While the embodied state of belonging is intimately and intricately subjective, the idea of belonging is recognizable to us all: to be wanted, to be welcomed, to be accepted, to be included. Many of us look for this in other people, in community. Humans tend to locate ourselves in social systems and relational webs, but lately I am understanding myself more deeply because of the places I known, the places I have lived.

To be of a place means to find yourself in the mycelial, interwoven histories that are held in the living records of land. This language isn’t written in English. To be of a place is to be carved like a rock eaten by wind or wave, to interact with its unique energy, to know its taste – like how this particular plot of earth smells after the rain. To be of a place is to recognize the aberration of a natural disaster; the before and the after.

These memories are the ancient songlines our soul grooves into the land.

I might not inhabit these lands any longer – but I will forever belong to the idyllic enclaves of Elysian Park, where I had my first awestruck homecoming with psychedelic mushrooms thirteen years ago.

I will forever belong to the unruly streets of Downtown Los Angeles where I made a home in a windowless warehouse room inside of an illegal art space for six months when I first landed.

I will forever belong to the stretch of Highway 9 running between Boulder Creek and San Francisco where I knew each part of the forest by its personality, the indescribable feeling of some immense intimacy breathing into all of me.

I will forever belong to the belly of an ancient sequoia where I slept unprotected and alone for a night while (I later found out) a mountain lion prowled.

I will forever belong to the Tomales Bay ocean fog rolling in while I lit my illegal beach bonfire with my last soggy match.

I will forever belong to Dougie Fir, the enormous sentinel tree that watched over my mountain home at the end of a long and bumpy dirt road.

I will forever be entangled in the roots and soul of California.

Because I belong here.
Because the soul of her also lives in my bones.

Because Cali initiated me into who I was meant to be.

It is not always where we were born or where our ancestors walked that offers itself as a soul home. The concept itself is a fingerprint, universal and yet wholly unique to each person, each story, each ecosystem. There are places I’ve lived for many years that never felt like home to me. Some even felt hostile, alien, in their holding of my existence. Some places I couldn’t wait to leave. Perhaps homeland is a place where we recognize ourselves as a necessary part of this living, breathing weaving; a place that requires our active participation in a way that is significant to our soul. I see how certain places called forth from me a new and necessary aspect of my essential beingness and demanded that I become one of the characters I contain in service of a broader unfolding story. I find it hilarious and perfect that my favorite soul homes are often nestled in the wilderness on the fringes of some established, chaotic metropolis.

When California finally spit me out, it was a devastating and messy ending. I wanted to stay here forever and couldn’t see myself anywhere else, but I had recently been initiated in the Dagara lineage. Coming into an ancient field of consciousness, which is what a medicine stream is, had sent me into a total life dismemberment. Put one way: the old patterns no longer computed and I was in a massive system reset designed to make me into someone ready to carry medicine. I couldn’t fathom the idea of leaving my home in California, this land that had been the first to really welcome me and had birthed me so fully – but then the walls of my home fell down around me. It became excruciatingly clear that my mission here was complete.

Nonetheless, I arrived in DC kicking and screaming, resisting the call of my next home. I wasn’t ready to believe it for awhile, but it turns out I belonged there too.

I write you this a week after my return from the West Coast, now on a train from Washington, D.C. to New London, Connecticut to visit a dear sister. She and I met in the closing song of my time in California, colliding in the small mountain town of Felton during the pandemic because the men we were both dating then were best friends. She is now back on the East Coast, living in the town she grew up in and surprised at her acceptance of this unexpected redirection. We marvel and laugh at the ways in which life has woven us and taken us down pathways we never could have prophesied or planned.

The message I keep receiving as of late is: there is nowhere to get to, no actual ‘where’ to arrive. Nothing exists in a straight line. I have reached for belonging my whole life, and yet I only seem to find it in the not trying.

In the undoing of my driving agenda, in my surrender to a force far more wild and divine.

Martin Shaw, mythologist and storyteller, once wrote: To be of a place is that moment where, for a brief pocket of time, you are the eyes of that place looking back on itself when it is pleased with itself.

I chew on this. Even in my absence, I feel the depth of my kinship with California. It was a home to me yes, but more importantly I became a home to me while there. I take these teachings with me. This relationship anchors me into a greater energetic matrix, an ancient root that knows and holds my soul regardless of where I live.

Before I leave, LA graces me with a gift.

I find myself one afternoon on the roof deck of another dear sister friend, the one I have been staying with in Topanga. I am resting on a chaise lounge, watching the far mountain’s colors shift as the sun arcs across the sky keeping time. Above me, the wings of many hummingbirds vibrating as they fight for the last nectar from the three feeders. I have nowhere else to be but here, with the land that mothered me unconditionally until I was ready to leave her nest.

Out of nowhere, a single, iridescent hummingbird feather falls onto my white shorts. It’s so tiny, so fragile, that I hold my breath lest I blow it off my finger.

For a perfect moment, a wee rainbow blessing belongs to me.

Then I let it go, and I make my way home.