A September Letter from Your Wise Woman
Hello, friends.
Amidst all the late-summer stirrings and the many fiery shifts we are all navigating, I've been talking to many of you. Things are SPICY. It's somehow comforting to know this is a collective experience. That together, we can tend to each other, recalibrate, and continue on.
I’ve been thinking about the ways mystery finds us when we become quiet enough to notice what is whispering underneath all the noise. Lately, I've been working with the themes of sanctuary, refuge, and the liminal world. Specifically, how do we find refuge - or create and step into sanctuary - so we can restore and recalibrate in a world that is undefinable. Liminal. The constant flux that lives in the in-between. I've been exploring what that looks and feels like for me.
Today, I'd like to invite you into this conversation.
First, a short story about finding refuge and meaning in the liminal. Next, three free gifts and offerings for you. Then, a heart-felt invitation for you - and your favorite people - to sink into sanctuary here in Bacalar, Mexico.
Three Bats at the Threshold
One of my teachers once told me, “Michelle, everything speaks. And everything wants to be heard.”
This is a story about listening—especially in the liminal spaces, where meaning rarely announces itself plainly.
One of my best friends, K, is visiting me at Casa Sabia, our jungle home-sanctuary at the edge of the turquoise waters of Bacalar. We raised our boys together; nearly thirty years of shared life have become ley lines across our bodies.
It is a joy to have her here, and part of that joy is offering her refuge.
K and her wife have a very, very big life, with little room to rest or recalibrate. My friend has spent much of her life tending to others, using her intuition, energy, and many gifts in their care. Now, at 66, she is moving through a deeply transitional season.
During the two weeks before she came to Mexico, something strange happened. Strange enough to notice, because it happened twice.
She found a dead bat outside the entrance to her new house in Portland. Not entirely unusual. But a week later, just as she was reclaiming her home after remodeling, another dead bat appeared at the back entrance.
Two bats. The same "entrance" threshold. One week apart.
She noticed. She wondered. And then she came to Bacalar.
Here, in the jungle of the Yucatán Peninsula, bats fill the night. At dusk, they dip low over the pool. In the depth of night, their dark forms flicker across the starry sky.
Yesterday morning, I rose early and began tending to the little things in the house while everything was quiet. Near the threshold of the front door, I noticed what looked like a curled maple leaf tucked into the southern corner.
Then I remembered: no maple trees grow here.
I moved closer. It wasn't a leaf.
My heart sank. It was a tiny dead bat, no larger than my thumb, her belly soft fawn, her wings and delicate fingers curled inward. She seemed to have died just recently.
And suddenly, one week later, here was bat number three.
I don't know how she entered the house, flew through these rooms unseen, or came to rest so quietly near the entrance. But one thing felt clear: she was not here for me.
Three bats. Three thresholds.
Spirit-sent messages often arrive through repetition. One occurrence can be chance. Twice makes us curious. Three times, something asks us to pause—to listen more deeply.
When K came out of her room, I led her to what I had found. “Oh,” she whispered, gazing at the wee still creature, her eyes filling.
We wrapped the little bat carefully and thanked her for being a messenger. K sat with her, then walked the land, listening for the place that would hold her body. She buried the bat with a small ritual in a sheltered place that opens toward the lush, verdant jungle.
Afterward, we built a sacred fire.
We began looking more deeply at bat and at what her arrival might mean. Bats are creatures of the liminal, able to navigate the unseen. In the living Maya cultural landscape, they are associated with caves, the underworld, and passage between states; they also carry connections to fertility, rebirth, and messenger imagery.
Here is what moves me: A bat sends something of herself into the darkness and listens for what reality sends back. How often do we allow ourselves to do that when we can't see what lies ahead?
K's bats arrived already deceased. Death speaks of finality, of a cycle completed. Yet death also clears the ground. It makes room for rebirth.
K has been living in a liminal place for more than a year, hearing the faint voice of an old internal navigation system: the part of her that found safety by adapting, the self shaped by responsibility and expectation, the woman accustomed to orienting through other people's needs, approval, and happiness.
Now she is here at Casa Sabia, resting and reorienting somewhere between who she has been and who she is becoming. The old life is not entirely gone. The new one is not yet visible. There is no trustworthy map forward.
That is the essence of liminality: the place between, where the maps that brought us here may not be the maps that can take us where we are going.
Today, I returned to the place K chose for the bat. Protected, but not enclosed. Held, but not held back. Sheltered by trees, with an opening toward what comes next.
Perhaps there is something there for all of us, especially those who have reached an age when becoming is no longer about adding more.
Sometimes becoming asks us to put something down: an identity, an obligation, a way we learned to be useful. Even a gift can become so entwined with responsibility that we forget it belongs to us, too.
Perhaps this is what refuge is for. Not escape. Not withdrawal from life. A place quiet enough to hear what has been whispering beneath our busyness—and to return home to ourselves.
There is something particularly tender about being able to offer this to my friend. For years, we were women creating refuge for our children and tending to others through their journeys. Now, nearly thirty years later, she has come to this place I helped create deep in the jungle. For a little while, she does not have to tend.
I can tend the space. The jungle can hold the edges. The water can do what water does.
And she can simply be here.
I don't know whether the bats were messages. I don't need to know. Mystery stops being mystery when we insist on explaining it. But three small creatures appeared at three thresholds during an extraordinary passage in my friend's life. The third appeared somewhere quiet enough for her to listen.
I feel profoundly grateful. For my friend. For this land. For this strange little messenger.
And for a life shared with those who still remember that we, too, belong to the great mystery.
Three FREE ways to expand and connect, dialing in more support, consciousness, healing and insight for these shifting times.
Now more than ever, I believe medicine is meant to be shared. These gifts are for you; feel free to share with anyone you think could benefit.
1) Free course : Navigating Psychedelic Spaces: 8 Key Insights to Enhance your Journey is designed to help you prepare for, navigate, and integrate your psychedelic experience: Prepare with intention, setting, and the right guide. Build a reciprocal relationship with the medicine. Stay safe, and integrate what you receive.
2) Monthly Women's Group: The Circle of Emergence. The Circle is a monthly 60-minute online space connect with women in an international and cross-generational way— a space where together, we remember that none of us are meeting the future alone. We gather for shared inquiry, kinship, and timely wisdom.
3) Dive deeper with my Substack: Sanctuary and Sanity. Here I write for those who like to swim in the deep end of the pool. For wayfinders, visionaries, midwives, and future ancestors. Sometimes I write about creating a new life, in a new country, in the jungle. Or whatever lights me up.
Nothing makes me happier than sharing amazing things.
I've been listening deeply. Responding from my heart. Last year, in a move that was both audacious and unexpected, I was called to steward a jungle property in Mexico's southern Yucatán, at the edge of the Bacalar's crystallline lagoon. It's been a year and a half of trusting the mysteries of the unknown. And now, Casa Sabia - our eco-luxe sanctuary - is asking to be shared with you.
Our magical home is now open for rent, from September to early January, with 2027 dates upon request. (Think warm, tropical holiday vacation...) Experience your sacred sanctuary, your space for refuge and renewal.
Details here, and feel free to DM me.
Do you feel called by the wonder, magic, and medicine of Bacalar, Mexico? Join me here in 2027 for a private or group retreat, with or without medicinal plants. I would love to create and curate something just for you and your favorite peeps. (I'm still available to see you in person in Central Oregon as well!)
Coming in Feb. 2027: Gifted yogi Liz Skarvelis and I will be offering a Women’s Week-Long Restorative retreat in February 2027, at the water's edge in Bacalar.
Curious about these transformative experiences? DM me here: 541-603-8485.
Love and infinite blessings,
Michelle
