How Is It “Placed” Or “Dissolved” About The Country You Live In?

Happy Winter Solstice to you all! I would like to thank you for another year of caring about the work I do, being on this newsletter, reading what I write and participating in the workshops and other programs I offer, and giving me the gift of serving you all. After a rocky year and a half of displacement that destroyed the home I raised my daughter in for 17 years, after nine months of living temporarily in the wonderful town of Forestville, California, near the Russian River, Jeff and I have finally arrived at our new home near Bodega Bay, in Western Sonoma County, and my daughter is home with us for her first NY holiday season at the PraCtt Institute.

So I’m happy. This change has been one of the most difficult changes in my life, along with the loss of my father and mother. With my daughter flying into her beautiful single life, with my housemate of 15 years returning to the East Coast to be closer to her family, and my home now in foreclosure, I’m angry to be turned into a landlord’s business center, and with no other place to live on my beloved Muir Beach, I’m deeply traumatized by my long-standing close relationship.

I didn’t know how I was “placed” until I felt abandoned. Feeling the placement creeps up on me a little. Over the years, I studied all the plants that grow on Muir Beach, always in bloom and when they poke their heads out of the world- every daffodil and where it grows every season, every lupine, every field of California poppies, every naked lady with its bare brown stems that emerge months after its photosynthesizing green. I knew all the animals, where the foxes live and where they have little fox cubs, all the coyote papa deer, all the bobcats and the humpback whales as they pass north and south along our coast.

I knew where all the edible plants in the world grew, and during the lockdown, we spent weeks eating almost that. I knew when to harvest and which tree the owl roosts in before hunting at dusk. It occurred to me at one point in my journey to “place” that this was something very Native, something I had never experienced in my life or fully understood until it was snatched away from me suddenly and against my will.

I knew Mount Tamalipais as my father of holy mountains, to whom I woke up every morning from my window. I knew Muir Beach and Stinson Beach ocean like my mother. I knew the bones of animals that died on Muir Beach around the circle of eucalyptus bones as my ancestors, and the bones of my pets and the ashes of my parents that I had scattered in my yard near the labyrinth there. I knew this world as a place where I was a mother and saw my child grow from a little 3 year old to almost 20 years old now, come January 6th.

After all my research on traditional healers for my book Holy Medicine, I realized that this feeling of being “placed” is very indigenous. Most of us have lost that medicine, but I was lucky enough to find it even though Muir Beach is in unknown territory to the Coastal Miwok, and it does not belong to me or my ancestors. The land of my ancestors is unfamiliar to me, but this land was home, even though it was built on the misery of colonial rule.

All that history has changed for me now. My grief over the loss of my Muir Beach home and its people and land and my daughter’s transition into adulthood has been as difficult as the grief of death. It hit me with waves that shortened my heart as if I was working. Saddening all this at the same time as I am saddened by the loss of the will of the people in my country has taken my breath away. Just as one must breathe and push during childbirth, I have struggled to breathe when the contractions hit me, but I am committed to continuing my activism, however, because now is not the time to stop resisting fascism and authoitarianism, no matter how my own grief may take my breath away.

But a little light is on the way as the solstice approaches us in the Northern Hemisphere, as the darkest days come upon us, with the promise that each day will be a little longer after the solstice. I always find that promise to be hopeful, even in dark times.

I feel the light coming into me, too. We just finished unpacking, moving 17 years worth of stuff that we’ve been trying to get down, while putting together Jeff’s stuff. This is the first home that Jeff and I have walked into that is not mine, or his, but ours. We’re about to play house together, to appreciate the hunt at consignment shops and estate sales, to get our taste of the 1870’s renovated barn we now call home. It’s starting to feel like home, with all my and my daughter’s art hanging on the walls, and all our old and new things adorning the lawn and the high-ceilinged great rooms that still have hoof prints on the floorboards.

But it’s weird here too. I feel ashamed of this new world in West Sonoma. As a new lover who doesn’t know the curves of a new human body, I feel out of place and unfamiliar in my new environment. Although the country is similar to Muir Beach, it is 1 ½ hours north on Highway One. I know the plants and animals, the tides come and go all day long. In Forestville, I was in the woods. I couldn’t see the sky, and I was far from the ocean, so I lost track of the moon’s cycles and tide patterns. But now, I’m so far from San Francisco that I can see the Milky Way from my new backyard hot tub, and I know exactly where the moon is in its cycle and when low tide is at Dillon Beach, where my dog ​​can run wild among the sand dunes around Tomales Bay.

I learn where the tide pools are at low tide, where the colorful starfish appear, and the urchins grab my finger with their sticky tentacles when I reach down to pet them. As I learned to harvest oysters when Jeff and I lived on Cape Cod, I will learn to harvest clams and clams here and maybe get a fishing rod to share with the men who catch Dungeness crabs with their hookless poles in the ocean. I know the tule fog that has been covering us for the past month has just lifted, allowing the temperatures to warm up a bit.

Being “The Place”

On this winter solstice, I invite you to explore how you feel placed or removed from your place. If you’re fired, maybe it’s time to go on a few dates with a world that supports and holds you. Here are a few gentle ways to do that—not given as instructions, but as invitations.

You might start by simply noticing how your body feels where you are sitting. Do you exhale when you get home? Do your shoulders droop when you go outside? Or do you remain steadfast, vigilant, steadfast? The nervous system usually knows long before the mind does that it feels trapped.

You may start learning the names of things around you, as well as the names of the people who lived in your country in the first place. Not in a practical or romantic way, but in a relational way. What trees share your blog? Which nation took care of this land? What birds sing in the morning where you live? What weeds persist in the cracks of the road? What is the name of the bay you live near, or the lake you swim in, or the mountain out your window? Naming is a form of respect. Say, I see you. I’m willing to get to know you.

You may mark time with something other than your clock or calendar. Be aware of when the light changes in your kitchen in the afternoon. When the fog comes in or rises. When the first rain changes the smell of the soil. When the moon makes it difficult or easy to sleep. These are the ways the world speaks, quietly, always.

If you are grieving for the country you once loved—or the home that held you to such an important chapter—know that this grief is worth it. In our culture, we don’t often see grief based on place, but your heart does. You are allowed to mourn the mountain, the beach, the backyard, the view. You are allowed to miss a place the way you miss a person.

And if you feel deeply displaced—by movement, by climate change, by economic pressure, by colonialism—be gentle with yourself. Migration is not a personal failure. Joint wound. One many of us carry, often without language about it. However, even within that reality, a relationship is possible.

You can sit down and let your body make contact with the earth beneath you.

You can give thanks—out loud or silently—for the water you drink, the food you eat, the shelter you keep.

You can ask the world humbly, how do you want to know me? How can I be here without you?

You can make offerings to landscape flowers, songs, small altars under trees or on beaches, as many cultures do. (There are many instructions for doing this in my book Holy Medicine, and on the blog I wrote Holy Reconciliation.)

Being of the world does not mean having possessions. It means giving back, caring, and listening. He shows himself again and again, strangely, even shyly, even uncertainly.

As the wheel of the year turns and the light begins to slowly return, may this solstice be the limit for you, too. It’s a time to honor what’s been lost, what you’re learning, and what might still happen. Wherever you are, may the world beneath your feet know it.

And may, in time, you feel known for it.

Happy Winter Solstice, dear ones!

*In 2026, I will be dedicating another day or weekend of teaching with the help of IFS, person to person and myself in this new world that I know. If you would like to learn more, just send your interest to support@LissaRankin.com. Part of the intensives, if you wish to hear them, will be earth-based rituals that allow a deep experience of whatever you call, let go of, or dream to happen.