i wanted to go home for my birthday. It was the first time in two years. It’s hard to understand how I grew up, how that completely informed who I am today. When I get mad at Esalen, it feels like I’m mad or I’m hurt by my parent. How can you feel abandoned by a place? I have. But a few weeks ago, a message came through from inside: “don’t punish the land for the people who steward it” - so here I was yesterday, trying to make sense, going back to my Giving Tree, sitting on her stump. Remembering us. Time became simultaneous: I was at once a child on my father’s shoulders, looking at the Milky Way as we climb the dirt hill from the bathes, but then I was also a teenage romance on a massage table wrapped in hot towels, and he’s telling me about satellites where I thought there were only moving stars. And when it’s sunny, I’m doing my homework on a massage table in the afternoon just afternoon and my dad is walking by to get a massage client, and I’m embarrassed to have him see me developing into a woman. I’m in the top tub with my friends and the handicap chair was just put in, we’re riding it back and forth - our version of a roller coaster, in and out of hot water, and someone grabbed a hose. Now it’s a water fight. Memory is strange. It feels circular and ghostly. So many elders gone. So many pushed out. If I could have one thing for my birthday, it would be a version of Esalen where I get to see everyone all at once, where Baba is performing and it’s the 4th of July celebration. No one told me my embalmed childhood could become ruins in my lifetime, but that’s what happened. And the gate guard asked me if it was my first time. I wanted to say that it was my first time getting a guest pass, but she didn’t know me, she didn’t know anything of me. Only the land does now. I guess that’s why I made @secularsabbath , because no one can ever take ‘community’ out of it.