This land, he said, it’s the frontier. It’s the edge of the wild, the los Padres mountain range that runs across the country and divides the East and West. You can start walking and keep going for days. That’s why they couldn’t sell this house, the rich yuppies moving to Ojai, it was too much of a risk, set right on the fire belt and below the ridge, with its boulders. No-one was willing to invest such chunk of money, and so the hippy lady who owner it, she agreed to rent it to us. Its native Indian land, the archaeologists were here before the printing press.
He pointed to the solar panelled shed I could make at over the main house, that’s where they would print books and now its my studio. And here, and he rubbed his feet against the earth as Man, bouncing Mae the baby up and down, this is where the tribes settled. They say they used to source their stones from the creek.
No wonder then.
Something so powerful had drawn me here, and all the while, this voice within, whispered home, home, home. I headed out late afternoon after bathing in the creek, and as I drove past stables, and horses , the golden light of magic hour, I start to sob. For this feeling of homesickness. The beauty of it captivated me. As the car crested the hill and the road curved around the ridge to snake down into the valley, and below the barren browns of the mountain erupted a valley of emerald green, dotted with houses and dripping in the golden light, and my whole body shook with delight and surprise, tears streamed my cheeks. This was it, the place I had seen in my visions, in past lives, I, an Indian chieftain’s daughter, standing alone on the ridge, watching the tribal life below.
What had followed next was destruction and death, and this past life that kept me so alone, this guilt, I had rewritten, cut the energy ties, energetically, this was the place for me to be, to birth whatever ached to come through me, that wouldn’t let me rest until it did. If I could keep the channel clear, stay focused, then it would.
Ojai is an ancient place of healing.