Home Is a Frequency 

The rented carriage house in Putney, Vermont, sits at the end of a long dirt drive, tucked into the woods so still the silence catches my racing thoughts mid-flight and holds them.

I booked it the week before, scrolling Airbnb before dawn, following that pull low in my gut. The universe doesn’t separate herself from my body anymore, her voice is my body. Heat swirls through my chakras swift and deliberate, lighting up my chest like a flare. For years I drowned this signal with logic and fear. Now, when she shows up with fire, I move.

The equinox has drawn me in for as long as I can remember, though I couldn’t say why. Living on the east coast, it’s more than marking the arrival of spring, it’s a special single day when light and dark stand face to face as equals, neither overpowering the other. For years, I was fascinated by this inspirational balance from our greatest teacher, nature while I was busy living in extremes of full productivity or total collapse, constant motion or paralyzing stillness. But this year, after two years of learning to hold discomfort without running, my body finally recognized what the earth does every March.

I packed my Nissan Altima coupe to the brim. Bins filled with colorful blankets from Latin America, stones and shells and bones gathered from travels, yoga mats and foam rollers, tinctures and salves made in my kitchen. A cooler full of loose teas, veggies and eggs

and a mason jar of liquid gold, a  homemade anti-inflammatory tonic sharp and zesty with fresh ginger, citrus and turmeric. Of course, there were other goodies – aged gouda, fig jam, two bottles of wine: a Piquepoul from France and a funky Pinot Noir from Oregon’s producer Swick, plus a suitcase of my favorite sweats for every mood.

Some might call it excessive, but my Taurus sun calls it necessary luxury.

By the time I pulled up to the carriage house, the light was already softening. I unpacked slowly, arranging everything with presence. An altar came together on the wooden coffee table- stones, crystals and shells, a small plant, my grandmother’s magnet that says GRACE in blocky letters, my journal. Later, after a walk through the wet woods at Putney Mountain, I added fresh moss and a small branch still dripping with rain.

I brewed a pot of cat’s claw and let it simmer on the stove. The earthy, bitter aroma filled the small kitchen. While the pungent flavor is unpleasant to some, my body craves it, grounding me in the medicinal aroma. I first met this plant in the Amazon during my ayahuasca retreat, drinking it three times a day while we fasted. Back then it punished me with nausea that left bed ridden for hours. Now my body calls for it and when the heat inside start to build and inflammation flares, I know energy is stuck and I know to brew this tea and let it do its work. The last two times my body called for this medicine, the bag of woody vine weighed out to exactly $4.44. My angel number. The one that follows me, haunts me, guides me, taunts me, depending on the day.

I’d come here with intention. To guide myself through a solo mushroom ceremony to welcome the astrological new year and the Spring Equinox, a threshold moment where I stand between what was and what’s coming and giving my body a safe space to release what is no longer in service of my growth.

I wasn’t looking for visions or cosmic downloads. I’ve done enough of that work to know the medicine shows up however it needs to. But I was met with unexpected disappointment as I unconsciously assumed the experience would be just like the last, this past new years eve, the night that the mushrooms gave me what I can only describe as “the best night of my life”. And Sweet baby Jesus-  I’ve had so many great nights. 

The mushrooms were gentle. Not the flooding, overwhelming kind of experience I’d braced for, it was far more internal. I noticed the part of me that wanted more, the part that still measures value by intensity, but that that part didn’t take over.

What came through was my body. Tension I was holding began to surface and release in my hips, fingers, jaw. The left side of my body where I’ve carried stress since I was a kid. I could feel the pressure loosening,  staying  with the sensation, noticing it, thanking it and instead of trying to understand it, letting the sensations move through without analysis. I let my body contort in whatever way it asked and through those movements tears and unexplained suffering exited. I saw flashing colors and felt the release, but I could not name anything, and I knew I didn’t need to. 

All I knew was something was leaving. 

I moved to the bed. Small movements at first, then bigger. Stretching in directions that felt both foreign and familiar, my body taking direction from my previous experiences releasing trauma through psychedelic medicine. I wept without knowing why and laughed at nothing, staying in the cozy bed for what might have been twenty minutes or two hours-  time dissolved the way it does when you stop fighting.

Suddenly I was dancing around this tiny, cozy space that wasn’t mine but felt like home. Just moving, free. And then it hit me, a wave of gratitude so big it knocked me sideways.

Even with all the horror and pain and unfairness in the world, even with everything still unresolved in my own life, this moment was enough. This body, this breath, this safe room full of art and things I love. This ability to move, weep and just be without needing permission or a reason.

Laughing and crying at the same time I wrote in my journal: “Expectations lead to disappointment. A lesson I will continuously learn until one day I release the desire for a certain outcome.” 

The next morning, I woke without an alarm past 8 a.m., a rarity. No earplugs, no sound machine! 

I keep coming back to that moment of feeling at home in someone else’s home. How I’d spent years searching for belonging in cities, relationships and identities I built and abandoned. Leaving New York because I thought the answer was somewhere else. Traveling for a year convinced I’d find it in Ecuador or Turkey or Bolivia.

And here I was, in a weekend rental in Vermont, surrounded by my own things when the feeling I’d been chasing for years finally showed up. And while it felt out of nowhere, it was out of two years of sitting with what I’d spent a lifetime running from. The ceremony, the reflection, the slowing down created a clearing wide enough to finally see what had been building in those days that felt loneliness I’ve never experienced, empty of purpose.

And all of this came in a space that wasn’t mine, but it was for that moment, because I was there.

The search had turned inward at some point without me noticing. Somewhere between the jungle in Bolivia and the homestead in Turkey and the long months back in my childhood hometown, I’d stopped running from the question of who I am without all the external markers. I’d started listening to my body instead of overriding it. Learning to recognize and hold space for what feels true, not what I think should feel true.

The spring equinox is about balance. Light and dark holding equal space.

For the first time in my life, I feel that in my nervous system. 

I am not fixed, I am not healed, I just am. 

I can sense my body is preparing for something new, even though I don’t know what that is yet. There are expectations and I am almost sure they will lead to disappointment, but now I understand that is part of the journey. There will always be so much I can’t see, so much I don’t understand.

And for the first time in my entire life, that doesn’t feel urgent.

The equinox came, light shifted and a new cycle started.

Home is no longer a place I need to find, it’s a frequency I can tune into when I stop running from myself.

The mantra I’d been whispering to myself in strange beds across Ecuador and Turkey and Bolivia—Here I am. I am here—suddenly meant something I hadn’t understood when I started saying it. Back then, I was trying to convince myself I belonged in those places. Now I know: I was learning to belong to myself.

And this feels like a place I can move forward from.