Dear Bay Area Ones,

I am offering a fall retreat for parents. It’s a six part in person retreat over twelve weeks in my home from September to November 2026 and I want you to join us if you feel it. There’s space for six people.

We will meet for two hours each time, Thursdays or Fridays 10am-12pm. We will be in my living room and kitchen, or my back garden. The first hour will be for meditation, astrological transits, and a copper foot bath for one participant per session. The second hour will be a chance for me to feed you.

My most surprising deepest fulfillment in this season of my life is making food. It’s my entry point into wilderness / presence / aliveness while in my house, where I spend most of my time these days. I want to feed you as a shortcut to your own knowing.

I want to invite you to my house, and I want this retreat to be within our weeks, between child pick ups, short enough and close enough that we get to practice entering and leaving the beaming alive present space, so that we remember we never actually leave the beaming alive present space. When we practice coming and going from this within the flow of our lives, we can remember we don’t need special circumstances to feel it.

I’m also thinking about land acknowledgement. And how when we forget that our bodies are water, and lament the rain, it’s evidence we’re forgetting we are also land.

“All is land there is no other.” This is a guiding principle here. I want us to be together to remember we are land together. Therefore there’s no distinction between caring for ourselves and our children, our partners, our everyone. So we cannot neglect ourselves.

The other thing I’m thinking about as I invite us to this gathering is grandmother consciousness. A place to sit together quietly and pull our grandmother wisdom from the future into the present. What needs and wants to be known about our relationship with our children right now? What wisdom can we remember from the future?

All is land there is no other, food and tea is land and we put land in our land bodies to nourish the land temporarily called our bodies and we nourish each other with the most generous loving thoughts we can find. If we’re lucky we can abandon thoughts here and there, or hold them as light as they really are, lighter than air. But while we’re in the realm of thought we’ll cultivate the most loving and expansive of them.

What if we remember the miracles that we forget are miracles?

What if we leave full, what if we infuse fullness into one weekday and then become a tea bag that the water bodies of our households can receive the land of?

What if we are in one person’s home, which is not so different from our home, crumbs on the floor, toys strewn about, dishes in the sink, and we remember that every singe part of being with our children and ourselves and our partners is sacred?

What if we remember to be our own gurus, borrowing our wisdom from awakening moments in the past and future?

What if we remember the exact place where we think we know nothing and are totally humbled in our parenting is the exact place where we become again one with land, we bloom as our grandmother selves from that exact sacred mud? What if we remember that the wisdom that comes from this difficulty is the wisdom human consciousness needs?

What if we remember that there’s so many other hearts opening exactly in this moment right this very second?

What if we remember, after we leave and go home, all the other people and what they said, how their struggles are the same, and so when we are then at home again at 5pm, with our children and the dinner is not yet cooked, and the kids are fighting, and everyone is starving, and the adults are getting way too mad, and then feeling bad about it, that everyone else is also probably doing a very similar thing? What if we feel the nourishment of that fellowship while alone in our houses? What if that nourishment is the fantasy commune we’ve been dreaming about? What if it’s a connection that we access anytime, because we intentionally access it together for a short retreat time?

What if we light incense and remember humans having been doing this, smelling smoke and remembering its portal to the divine, for thousands of years? What if we remember the miracle is that we get to know that we are one of them, while doing it, while lighting the incense?

What if we eat sesame seeds ground up together and remember that having a body through which to taste sesame seeds ground up is our purpose, we don’t even need another purpose in this moment except to delight in the sesame seeds and tell each other about it?

What if we sit on a blanket in the grass and breathe together and remember we’re only ever also land?

What if we didn’t have to be anything else, what if we could be held by the trust that we couldn’t be anything else?

What if we hummed together and felt the distinction of you and me dissolve for a bit? And when we came back into the temporary individual consciousness, it was a little lighter around us, a little less serious, a little less permanent?

What if we see worries as thoughts, and watch them dissolve, and feel the gorgeous joy of new space in and around us?

Stuff like that. Let’s do that together. Let’s see what happens. You don’t even have to talk. You don’t have to effort socially. It can be just a place you go to sit and be fed. But it might also be more. Let’s see about it. Let’s see what happens.

—

Pesto
Beet Hummus
Olive oil!
Seed crackers
Orange and gold soup
tea magic
miso dressing on broccoli
goma ae
my nana’s pound cake
almond butter brownies
meat stew with winter squash
pickled onions
that incredible ricotta in the basket
that sheep cheese with whole peppercorns in oil
flowers
my favorite fuschia table cloth
(my only table cloth, tbh)
tahini chocolate bites
borscht
who knows what else!
-

Humming together
silence together
writing lists of the magic together

Take off our shoes and walk up the stairs to my living room, turn off our phones, sit on the floor or the green couch, step out of time.

$666
September 10 and 24
October 8 and 22
November 5 and 19

$600 if you sign up before August 1.