There are souls who arrive on this earth already carrying the old contracts—the ones written in star-script and desert wind, in the ancient agreements between flesh and spirit that many have forgotten how to read.

 

​

This is about remembering.

​​

I was born into the Sonoran Desert's fierce embrace, where the saguaro abuelas have been holding ceremony for two centuries, their arms raised in perpetual prayer to the endless sky. This was Tucson, this was the beginning of everything—land that had cradled the Tohono O'odham and Pascua Yaqui peoples in sacred relationship since time before memory, teaching me my first lessons in true belonging.

​

The desert chose me before I chose it, the way great loves always unfold—inevitable as morning light touching the Catalina Mountains, certain as the monsoons that arrive each summer to resurrect the impossible from dormant earth. My childhood was written in dust and starlight, two older brothers as my companions in this wild education that no classroom could contain. We were creatures of pure instinct, our days spent on horseback traversing landscapes that held older wisdom than any book, learning the first and most important lesson: that we belonged to the land, never the other way around.

​

On the back of my horse, flying across arroyos and through ocotillo forests, I discovered the primal truth that would shape everything that followed—that freedom lives in the spaces between what the world insists we must be and what our souls know we already are. Gender became as fluid as the desert wind, and in that vastness where the earth herself was my first teacher, my queer, non-binary spirit found its original home. The horses knew what the colonizers had tried to steal from us: that the sacred comes in infinite forms, that we all belong to the great web of creation, that the spirit world recognizes no such thing as "normal," only the endless creativity of souls expressing themselves.

​

My love affair with this land runs deeper than rivers hidden beneath desert sand. Every dawn painting the saguaros gold, every twilight when the desert exhales its held breath, every summer storm that transforms the air into silver electricity—all of it lives in my cells like a permanent migration of the heart. The creosote taught me the medicine of resilience, the palo verde showed me how to bloom even in impossible circumstances, and the ancient grandmother saguaros whispered the secrets of belonging that can outlast empires: we are never alone, we are always held, we always have a place in the great story.

​

My family was forged from dreams deferred and determination that could move mountains. My mother, a secretary by necessity but a priestess of steady love by nature, whose quiet strength anchored our chaos like desert roots finding underground rivers that sustain life even in drought. And my papa—¡Ay, Dios Santo!—what a man of magnificent contradictions! Born in Sonora, Mexico, he crossed into this country at six years old with his hermanos y hermanos, Tata Cico and nana Josefina- their precious stories and the unshakeable knowledge that borders exist only on maps, never in the heart, that we belong wherever our love takes root.

​

Papa was a walking anthology of the deep west—charro, rodeo cowboy who danced with bulls as if courting death and life simultaneously, welder who could coax metal into poetry, master Millrite whose hands understood precision the way a curandero understands ceremony. But always, always, he was a man who moved to music as if joy were a prayer his body couldn't help but offer. From him I learned that a soul can contain infinite universes, that we belong to more than just one way of being, that the ability to dance is the surest sign of a spirit that refuses to be broken by this world's cruelties.

​

In nana's kitchen—that sacred temple where the real magic happened—she initiated me into mysteries older than written history. Her hands, weathered by decades of love and labor, guided mine as we transformed humble corn into tortillas that could heal any wound, as we stirred devotion into every pot until the very act of cooking became high ceremony. This was my first university, where I learned that feeding others is the most ancient form of medicine, that recipes are really incantations passed down through generations of women who understood that creating nourishment for others is how we build belonging, how we say you matter, you have a place at this table, you are welcome here.

​

When I cook now—whether for one precious soul or for many gathered around my table—I call in the ancestors whose love guide in my hands. I let my heart season every dish, trust that nourishment feeds far more than just the body. Each meal becomes an offering, a way of creating belonging through love made edible. This is how love travels: through salsas that carry the memory of summer tomatoes, through caldos that hold the warmth of every embrace ever given, through tortillas that rises with the prayers of all the mothers who came before, saying to anyone who tastes it: you belong here, you are home.

​

At twenty-one, following currents as ancient and invisible as the paths migrating birds have traced for millennia, I traveled north to Colorado. Here, among peaks that pierce heaven itself, on the ancestral lands of the Ute, Cheyenne, and Arapaho peoples—cultures that honored two-spirit beings and gender fluidity long before colonization tried to erase such wisdom—my path as healer, weaver, and storyteller continued to unfold like a desert flower that had been waiting its whole life for exactly the right amount of rain.

​

This new land became another teacher, another place of belonging. The high country showed me different ways of listening—to aspen leaves that shimmer prayers in autumn wind, to mountain streams that carry snow-melt stories from peaks touched by clouds, to wildflowers that bloom for just a few precious weeks each year and teach the profound beauty of impermanence. My relationship with the earth deepened into something approaching devotion, a daily practice of falling in love with the world all over again, of remembering that we belong to something infinitely larger and more beautiful than just our human stories.

​

My own rites of passage have been my greatest teachers, those threshold crossings that transform us from one version of ourselves into something we never imagined possible. Coming into my queerness was one such initiation—learning to love the parts of myself that didn't fit the world's narrow definitions, discovering that what makes us different often makes us holy, finding my place in the great constellation of beings who love outside the lines. Finding my healing gifts was another—recognizing that my intuitive sensing, my ability to listen to others stories beneath my hands, wasn't a burden but a calling, a way of belonging to the ancient lineage of those who tend the wounds. And stepping into my role as wisdom keeper, gentle witness, and companion for others' journeys—this has been the ongoing initiation that shapes every day.​

​

This is my story, still being written with each sunrise, each person who trusts me with their tender becoming: a soul rooted in ancient earth and ancestral love, shaped by desert winds and family devotion, walking the path of those who remember that the most radical act of resistance is to love ourselves and each other back to the knowing that we belong—to the earth, to each other, to the great mystery that holds us all.