For the last many months, I’ve been working at Inner-Tribal Treatment Center, a fully Native-run recovery clinic for Native peoples of all nations on lil turtle island
Humbled. Me, a little Jewish girl, joked by the elders that I may not have grown up on a rez but I do come from my own “tribe of Judea”. I’ve been sitting with vision and wondering how to share it.
Working with those who carry the weight and pulse of generations, I have had the honor of attending soul-bending sweat lodges with my clients and teachers, learning how to smudge and pray in that “good Native way”, deepening my therapy practice by holding the exquisite complexity of pain, joy, tradition, and resilience, and witnessing how a community rebuilds through remembering the old wisdom of the ancestors.
Here in Pauma Valley, the home of the Rincon Band of Luiseño Indians, the mountains are heavy with citrus and avocado trees. A place with a small town feel, where the land meets the sky, and two burrito shops with the same name (Jilbertos) sit less than a mile apart.
I have the profound privilege of learning from elders like Paulie, who is Navajo and Yaqui, and spent forty years behind bars with Sundancers carrying the old songs, the songs almost lost, that carry ancient wisdom through the generations. From Mr. Anderson, a Navajo elder who feels like grandfather, a teacher, and a deep friend, I’m learning that humor and pain can be medicine together, that laughter sometimes is what cracks open the doorway to spirit. And every day, I am humbled by the clients themselves, reminded that what is carried here is not just trauma, but deep resilience and even deeper prayer, the stubborn endurance of those who came before, and those who are here now.
In the Wellbriety teachings they say: “They tried to bury us, but they did not know we were seeds.”
I know I am a guest here, and I am learning, every day, how to carry these lessons with care, with reverence, and with my heart. How to move through the world holding what I am shown like fire in my hands. Some wisdom is spoken….Some wisdom is lived….And i’m sensing that some wisdom, sometimes, is entrusted to you for a little while.
Happy birthday (and 6 month death day) to my Dad 🩷
What a journey losing him in this realm has been. Honestly thank gd your dad only dies once. IYKYK!
Shoutout to the digital era for this amalgamation of memory. My heart aches and grows wider each day…Love and miss you more than more
