Adi and I are spending the summer at Sovereignty Ranch in the Hill Country. Adi and her dear friend Mollie Englehart, who owns the ranch, are starting something new together. The two of them are building a holistic wellness center out near Bandera, where the land opens wide, and the noise of the world falls behind you.
This land carries a specialness most of us have forgotten how to feel. You wake here and you feel it in your bones before your mind has words for it. The hills rise around us in long rolling waves and hold this place like cupped hands. Ridge after ridge runs off toward the horizon until the farthest ones go blue and soft with distance. Morning lays gold along their crests and evening carries it away. I have loved many places. Nothing has ever stilled me like these hills. Cattle drift slow across the pasture, and your dinner grew within walking distance of the table. A regenerative ranch gives more to the earth than it ever takes, and you feel that generosity settle into you after a few mornings. Living here, the body remembers a pace it knew long before any of us were born.
Right now, the health center is still in its infancy. What they see is materializing slowly and will one day hold red light, a sauna and a cold plunge, a hyperbaric oxygen chamber that will change the way we understand healing. Two women deciding that how a body recovers naturally and holistically is worth raising a room around.
I have watched Adi dream, and I have seen her sense what is coming long before the rest of us catch up to it. She listens to a thing until it tells her what it wants to become, and then she gives it exactly that.
The farm store at Sovereignty Ranch is built around the rusted bed of an old truck that quit being a truck a long time ago and became something more useful instead, a counter for the things this land produces, and the garlic hangs from the rafters in long braided bundles still wearing the dirt it grew in. There are bottles of hot sauce and herbal tinctures and jars of things made from plants that were standing in a field a short walk from where you now hold them, and raw milk and grass-fed meat and sourdough bread baked from grain that knows this exact soil, and the wagon wheel chandelier throws warm light across a concrete floor that has never once pretended to be anything fancier than a floor. Nothing here was shipped from far away and nothing here was designed in a meeting and nothing here is trying to be anything other than food that came from the ground outside the door.
There was a time, and it was not so long ago as we like to pretend, when this was simply how people ate, when a community gathered around a piece of land and asked it for sustenance and the land provided and everyone understood the arrangement because they could see it with their own eyes. We called the abandonment of this progress, and we got faster food and farther supply chains and the strange modern certainty that we had improved upon something. Somewhere in all that speed we lost the thing the garlic hanging from these rafters still remembers. A person can stand on this floor in the warm light with something in their hand that grew in the soil outside and feel the old arrangement quietly reassert itself, and understand, without anyone having to say it, that progress and improvement were never the same thing. Some of what we left behind was worth more than what we traded it for.
I’ve spent most of my life onstage, telling stories for laughs and feeling a room shift in real time. For twenty five years I hosted an improvisational show called Four Day Weekend, and that stage felt like home. In 2020 the world shifted, and so did I. The questions of the world began to matter more to me than comedy, and I turned toward writing about life's greater mysteries, finishing We’ll Always Have Paris and later Quietude, which became a quiet turning point in my life. Exploring The 12 Universal Laws widened the lens even more. Now the island reflections and everyday synchronicities I share carry one intention, which is to help you awaken to your highest potential. I am not here to convince or impress you. I simply hope to brighten your day, invite you to question what you have been told, and remind you of what you already know. Each morning I return to the same ground. I am awake. I am aware. I am able. I remember. Everything I share grows from there.