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 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 an ayahuasca retreat, drinking it three times a day while we fasted. Back then it punished me with nausea that left me bed ridden for hours. Now my body calls for it when 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 I purchased 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 and what feels like a threshold moment where I stand between what was and what’s coming, giving my body a safe space to release what is no longer in service of my highest self. 

I’ve done enough of this work to know the medicine shows up however it needs to and while I thought I was entering the ceremony without expectations, I was met with unexpected disappointment as I unconsciously assumed the experience would be just like the last. Maybe I was hoping for visions or cosmic downloads like I had received this past new years eve, the night that the mushrooms and I came together and state it simply, lives in my heart as “the best night of my life”.  And sweet baby Jesus, I’ve had so many best nights.  

The mushrooms were gentle. Not the flooding, overwhelming kind of experience I’d braced for. Immediately I was aware of the part of me that wanted more, the part that still measures value by intensity, but that that part never came.

The mushrooms worked the way plant medicine often does for me- not through visions or voices, but through my body letting go of what it had been storing. Tension I was holding began to surface and release in my hips, fingers, jaw. The left side of my body shook as waves of energy exited my body. I could feel the pressure loosening and I  stayed with the sensation, noticing it, thanking it instead of trying to understand it. Letting the sensations move through without analysis is an important part of my healing. I let my body contort in whatever way it asked and through those movements, tears and unexplained suffering exited. My eyes closed, I witnessed fast flashing colors of purples, blues and greens and I gave my body permission to release the pain, not sure what it was or where it came from. I knew I didn’t need to. 

All I knew was something was leaving. 

I moved to the bed. I wept without knowing why and laughed at nothing, under the warm blankets supported by fluffy pillows for what might have been twenty minutes or two hours, content to let time dissolve.

Suddenly I was dancing around this tiny, cozy space that wasn’t mine but felt still somehow 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, music, light and treasures. The 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 rental in Vermont, surrounded by my favorite things when the feeling I’d been chasing for years finally arrived. It felt sudden, like it came from nowhere. But it was anything but sudden, it came from two years of sitting with my myself and the subsequent discomfort which I’d spent a lifetime avoiding.

This weekend – the ceremony, the silence, the slowing down – opened a clearing wide enough to see what two years of uncomfortable work had actually built.  I could see what those two years had been beyond the profound loneliness and days that felt empty and without purpose. But looking back from this side, I understood, that emptiness was the work. The loneliness was teaching me something I couldn’t learn while I was busy proving my worth.

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

The search for a home and belonging had turned inward 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. My mind wants to build a story about what’s coming, to create certainty where there is none. I still catch myself building expectations, writing a script for the next chapter. But I know now that clinging to outcomes only narrows what’s possible. There will always be so much I can’t see, so much I don’t understand.

And for the first time in my life, I am at peace with the unknown. 

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

Here I am. I am here.

The mantra I’d whispered in a hundred rented rooms across the world, trying to make foreign places feel like home. I finally understood what those words had been teaching me.

Home isn’t a place to find. It’s a frequency I can tune into when I’m finally at home with myself.

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