A Village waiting to be born

In September of 2020 I began stewarding a 10-acre eco-reserve that some of you know as our land in Nicasio. It is an ancient Indigenous Sacred site and birthing center with a particular talent for transformation. It wants to help birth the next world.

For the first year and a half, essentially all I did was clear dead wood out of the meadow, move it into piles, and chip it whenever we could afford to rent a chipper. Slowly, as I grew familiar with the place, it became obvious where paths wanted to be. At a certain point a table appeared in my mind, and I couldn't stop seeing it every time I walked past a certain grove of bay laurel trees. Eventually I brought in a carpenter and we built it on site. So it has been with our fire pit, our film studio, and the other structures there — they have largely emerged out of the dreaming, and then we built them.

In December 2023, we took title to the land through an LLC I created for this purpose. My personal balance sheet wasn't strong enough for traditional bank financing, so we seller-financed the purchase with a three-year interest-only note. This December (December 2026), we have to refinance.

The value of the land as real estate has continued to increase since we purchased it. It is 45 minutes from San Francisco and in a valley with about 50 other homes/estates. But the remaining obligation is close to half a million dollars, and because it is raw land, the financing for that comes at a fairly high interest rate — close to 10% — and we've so far been unable to secure a loan term longer than ten years. Right now we pay $2,800 a month on the interest-only note. A ten-year note at current rates is likely to cost $6,500 a month.

At present, I've personally spent about $350,000 on the property — not counting any of the thousands of hours of my own time invested in tending the place. It has been, and continues to be, an existential relief, a joy, and an honor. And I have a family to feed and a 17-year-old daughter to put through college. I use the land for trainings right now about a month of the year, which means it sits unused by humans, more or less, the other eleven.

In my meditations at that place, for several years now, it has been apparent that a village is waiting to be born there. It is, clearly, a sacred site, and by its own gifts it wants to help the next world come into being. I've regarded my role as that of steward, and stewarding it has healed the primary wounding of my own childhood — an uprooting from place and from deep connection with the earth in a particular place.

I also have my feet firmly planted in financial reality. My company is growing steadily, about 30% a year, but I don't yet have resources of the magnitude this place needs. There's arborist work that's already overdue — we need to take out at least two large dead Douglas firs in the primary meadow — I’d like to build an elevated treehouse ($10-20,000), we're behind on property taxes ($13,000) and our road association dues ($3,000). Those are obstacles I know how to overcome; I've overcome much bigger ones. A mortgage payment jumping from $2,800 to $6,500 a month for the next ten years is probably not something I can overcome alone.

So I'm reaching out to those of you I believe have been touched by this place. I'm holding this lightly. I think something wants to come into form here that's larger than what I can manifest by myself, or tend by myself, and its exact shape isn't fully visible to me yet. But I know, broadly, who I'm looking for.