It’s been a year since I let go of the old world. What followed wasn’t a plan. It was a becoming. By the quiet grace of synchronicity, I began to manifest not what I thought I wanted, but what my soul had been asking for all along.
For 20 years, every single morning began something like this: cell already ringing before my eyes were open, all three phone lines blinking at once before I got to the office, 50-something emails landing while I was mid-knot on my shoes, 60-plus clients pulling in 60-plus directions, contracts on one screen, a scandal on the other, a manager furious, a publicist spinning, a brand executive confused, an award show three days away, a flight I was already late for. That was Tuesday. Wednesday looked exactly the same. So did every Thursday for two decades. And then one day, mid-sentence, mid-chaos, mid-everything, I decided to get off the ride. And discovered that what I had been chasing between all the noise had actually been waiting for me the whole time.
I landed in Tahoe City and found an altogether new rhythm.
At least one day a week, at the fun-family-run Hobo Ranch in Sierra Valley, I work the land under the steady guidance of Heather River, who also owns Bespoke/Atelier in downtown Truckee where we first met. She is a brilliant, kind, generous woman who teaches me the language of sheep, seeds, water, family, donkey, community, chickens, and soil. I’m learning how to listen before I plant, to carry more than tools, to host with intention. We line trees with wool sheared at the farm to nourish and protect the soil. I watch eggs gathered warm from the hen like treasure, whisper to sheep as they pass, build fences from old willow branches with nothing but twine and trust, and find new muscles in my body and in my spirit I didn’t know I had. I am becoming fluent in the earth.
And all around me on the farm, there is quiet medicine: a father who meets his son on his knees at day’s end, asking what felt magical. Brothers who move like kin and co-conspirators. A mother who gives without measure to her family, to community, to strangers, to life itself. She fights for the Earth, justice, and people she’ll never meet. And she does it all with grit, grace, and a kind of quiet fire that humbles you just to witness. Just being near them, my heart remembers how to mend.
At least one other day, I work beside a woman who once looked at me and knew. Herbalist and mystery magic weaver Aurora Wellise of Lawless Botanics makes tinctures, bath salts, teas, sprays, and speaks not just to plants but to the unseen. She reads Akashic Records. She listens. She remembers.
She doesn’t just grow herbs. She grows worlds.
She reminds me that healing is everywhere: in how we gather, in how we grieve, in how she meets difficulty with a sincere, “We’re not done yet.”
We drink from the spring and feel it rewrite something inside us.
She shows me how to ask permission before picking. How to move without disturbing the silence.
She doesn’t hand out answers. She makes space for the questions to rise.
There are teachers who hand you instructions, and those who hand you wild violet honey made from the flowers you gathered together, to gently show you how love preserves.
We work together in a rhythm deeper than words. Even in stillness, there is learning.
Our shared gratitude flows quietly on and off “work.” A thread of friendship and purpose.
From kitchen fires to soul fires, compost to cosmos, I’m learning not just how to make medicine, but to be it. Somehow, beside her, I don’t just move forward. I root deeper.
And once a week, as a Meals on Wheels volunteer, I deliver food to elders, some of whom are over 100 years old, and some who are barely scraping by, but whose wealth lives in stories and spirit. What they hunger for is not food, but connection. I sit. I listen. I fix their phones, their internet, their bathmats. I find other lovely humans to fix their stairs, chop their wood. I show up for their VA appointments. I help them sell what they’ve made with their hands. I meet them where they are. We hold hands and cry. We talk about the weather. They call me “Sparkles,” tell me I’m their favorite, and I feel it, we love each other.
The other day the sky held a thousand shades. In the passenger seat sat a carton of eggs and avocados all mottled, imperfect, beautiful. A reward not for what I earned, but for what I gave.
Some nights, I return home and cry, not from sorrow, but from a fullness that feels like freedom.
And there are other moments. Wild, beautiful, unscheduled.
A long soak in the hot springs with a friend, naked and soft from the day’s work. Our bodies resting, our spirits unraveling into one another. We spoke of life with that easy kind of openness that only comes when there’s nothing to prove, just presence. That, too, felt like medicine.
One night, I watched this documentary on sound healing and whispered to the universe, show me how. By morning, a friend had texted: “Come to kirtan?”
These are the moments that stitch the everyday into something sacred.
A small bird flew into a window and left her body behind so I made her a resting place, circled with dried flowers, a wooden round at the center. That night, I offered her to an owl. A quiet gift back to the wild.
And when the lake calls, I go. No plan. Just a dear friend beside me and a tug in the chest. We slip into the cold, living water, laughing like kids who remembered joy just in time.
These are the moments that stitch the everyday into something sacred.
I don’t know where this road is taking me. But for the first time, the journey itself is enough. And that, that is everything.
Call me Farmer Spice. Spirit Spice. Sparkle Spice. Why you gotta choose when you can be all?
What’s life without a little mix of color and flavor, anyway?
All Spice.
~ Once upon a time Hollywood agent of two decades. Born in Türkiye, schooled in frozen Ithaca, dazzled by L.A. first, then Tahoe, which quietly ended one life and led to another. Now farm-foraging, lake-dipping, farmers market junkie, living a life that can’t fit in a subject line. @ennis
