Lake Time

Updates from the shores of Lake Atitlán, Guatemala

Here I am in a tent under starry Guatemalan skies, writing by candlelight. It gets cold here at night, colder than you’d think if you haven’t been here, colder than it feels like it should under the blazing afternoon sun.

Here the mosquitos and coffee flies swirl among the spiraling cacti and purple flowers, which hang heavily across this dense jungle-garden in which I’ve found myself.

Here hummingbirds nest in the ayahuasca vines, and dogs howl from the shelter next door. Here incense spills into the night air, and the river whispers all night. Here, someone is almost always singing.

I didn’t expect to be here now. Nor did I expect or mean to take such a long break or big step back from Substack. But life, as we know, has a way of taking us on mysterious and unexpected journeys.

A while back, I wrote about being at a fork in the road between Guatemala and New York City. Obviously, and thanks to a little help from those in the comment section there, I chose Guatemala — chose to return to Lake Atitlán, to these blue waters that seem to have such a mysterious hold on me and so many others.

I’m doing a work exchange at a retreat center, essentially working as a front desk girl in a place with no front desk — eating with the guests, calming their fears of scorpions, filling water jars and lighting candles. It’s not just any retreat center, though.

It’s hard to explain this place from the outside. What I first noticed about this property, when I came here five months ago for the first time under similarly starry skies, were the alien-like blue flowers draping down from the platform that overlooks the lake. I knew immediately when I came here that this land had something for me, some rich lesson, some song I couldn’t help but stay and try to let flow through.

So far, one of my greatest pleasures has been getting to meet the guests, other wanderers taking time out of their lives, people who have been through so much just to get here, people who come with their own wisdom, stories, and openness to transformation. Connection has been one of the greatest pleasures of this life, and connections with women always seem to carry a special sweetness and purity for me. I’ve also been able to teach some harmonium lessons and vocal activations to the guests here, so it’s all weaving together.

Mostly, though, I’ve been focusing more and more on my own music. I’m playing in a weekly kirtan in a nearby city, which can only be accessed by a bumpy tuk-tuk or a boat. I’m meeting musicians, sharing my voice, going to jams, learning new songs.

Music has continued to call me deeper and deeper into its lush perfumed and poisonous garden. We will see where it leads, but it seems to be a call I cannot help but answer. Music as healing — music as medicine, music as mantra, music as a call of life — this seems to be the song that I am truly called to sing.

Today, I also just released three new songs with a musician and friend who I met early on at the lake, and who was quite pivotal in inspiring me to stay here and pursue medicine and healing music. You can listen to those here for a glimpse of what I’ve been up to here:

I’m also freelancing, diving back into the entertainment writing world I thought I’d left behind, partly to soothe my weeping bank account but also because I’ve found that writing articles is deeply grounding for me. Over the past year I often found myself missing the security of the 9-5 life, and wishing I could get another writing job like the old one that I had wished to leave for so long. Now, I’m in the later stages of interviewing for a new full-time remote writing job, and I am finding myself wishing I had treasured every minute of this time without the crush of a 9-5.

Truly, we take too much for granted.

For now I am here, drinking from the well of this lake’s blue waters, reeling through its strange and dreamlike pull. This lake is a magnet for wanderers, those drawn to a different life, drawn to creating a new reality, a new Earth. Yet it also is a magnet for people with deep-rooted dissatisfaction and deep shadows that need unearthing. This is true for all healing work, I think more and more. With ascension comes deeper descent.

Lately I’m less and less interested in the performance of healing and more and more interested in community. More interested in how wellness can weave with ecological sensibility and practical climate action. Less enchanted by huge psychedelic journeys that traverse spirit realms and more interested in how we can embrace mysticism in every moment in every day.

My heart feels lost a lot of the time, lost and confused. I’m trying to embrace the lostness, and sometimes I succeed.

I’m in a relationship, doing the dance of opening my heart to love. Many paths fork before me. I’m trying to balance staying present with also considering the future. I see strange fields unfolding — a life of sound healing, music and art and ecology. And then I see a return to a full-time job, to the so-called “matrix” (as if the lake was not a matrix in itself). And most likely it will continue to be a dance between them, a dance of learning, of mystic experiences and mundane suffering, a symphony of lessons and laughter, of layoffs and languishing and huge bursts of energy and work, a seasonal dance between light and dark, a cycle of opening and closing.

For now, I’m deep in the lake vortex. These waters soothed me so deeply when I first touched down on them eight months ago, and did the same when I returned from New York last month. They seem to soothe at first, and then they slowly guide me deeper into intense processes rooted in my deepest fears, and then they bring me to the surface to breathe again.

Or maybe that’s just life, especially during this season of my Saturn Return, this season of such growing, such alchemy, change, and coagulation.

For now, I’m just praying that everything that happens is in my highest good. I’m still not sure I believe in God, but I still want to. Sometimes I do.

I know I believe in Pachamama, who heals and tears us apart and resurrects us with her rainy, starry grace. It feels fated, somehow, that I ended up here and not India as planned — here in the land of earth-based shamanism that lives in the air, the water, the fire, and the soil.

I always believed that nature was probably god, in the end. That god was the rains, and the flow of water in our veins, and all these things were one and the same. This is the story I hope to illuminate with this newsletter, with my music, and with all I do: that we are one, interconnected, not separate from each other and the earth in our pain, storms, joy, and lightness.

Mostly I’m always just following the music.

Thank you for reading along!