Driving the American West in a U-Haul
Aug 29, 2026
I’m driving a U-Haul toward Texas with my car behind me, my belongings packed inside, coaching my clients from hotel rooms and parking lots along the way.
It’s given me space to think, and write this newsletter in my head as I go.
As I was driving away from Boise, I stopped at a friend’s place (the same friend I’d visited when I first arrived, 5 years and 25 days ago).
I guess symbolically, I arrived in Boise there, and I left Boise from there.
Watching it all drop away on the horizon, I was aware how much I’d changed.
The level of where I fundamentally come from inside myself is completely different. Not a little different, completely.
Back then I was fresh out of a ten year relationship. I wasn’t as connected to myself. I’d tied all my safety and security around being with a partner and being financially successful/secure. It was scary to feel like I was on my own, having to figure everything out.
I know now I was swimming in an evolutionary process- Learning not to put my center and grounding into someone else, into a relationship, into a bank account, an investment account or anything else outside of myself.
It was really quite something. It allowed me to invest deeply in my own Development, to understand the masculine and feminine, To understand why, as a woman, I was doing what I was doing. Where it was coming from inside of me, my deepest history. How I was wired.
When I could finally articulate that, the whole world opened up for me.
And now I’m here, driving a U-Haul into the sunrise.
Idaho into Utah.
Through Arches, Moab and Canyonlands.
Across Colorado.
Through Ute country and the Navajo Nation.
Past Shiprock rising almost impossibly out of the desert.
Northwestern New Mexico and Santa Fe.
Across the American West — a landscape that contains multiple histories at once.
Geological America: mountains, basins, deserts, rivers and rock formations created across incomprehensible stretches of time.
Indigenous America: thousands of years of human relationship with these landscapes, settlements, trade routes, agriculture, ceremony, languages and sovereign nations that continue today.
Spanish America.
Mexican America.
And the comparatively young United States layered over all of it.
โ
Santa Fe stopped me:
Maybe it was the mountains.
Maybe the enormous sky.
Maybe the adobe buildings that seem to emerge from the earth rather than sit on top of it.
Maybe it was learning that people were living around what is now Santa Fe centuries before the Spanish established the city in 1610.
Maybe it was standing in a place that has existed under Pueblo, Spanish, Mexican and American governance.
Or simply the combination of all of it.
I ate wonderful local Mexican food.
I found an Ayurvedic restaurant I liked so much I went twice.
I drank excellent coffee.
I walked.
I worked.
I filmed.
And I kept looking up.
At the mountains.
At the clouds.
At the light.
At this astonishing landscape.
And I kept thinking how lucky I am to be alive at a moment when I can experience so much of this planet.
Yes, this is an extraordinarily complicated time to be alive, but it is also an extraordinary time to be alive.
We have access to places, people, cultures, knowledge and experiences that would have been unimaginable to most humans throughout history.
And I don’t want to race through that privilege unconsciously.
I want to notice.
I want to remain capable of awe.
I want a mountain range I’ve never seen before to move me in indescribable ways.
I want to taste food made by someone who comes from a completely different tradition than mine.
I want to learn whose land I’m traveling through, and I want to understand what happened there before I arrived.
I want to look at something beautiful and be so deeply moved by it.
I cried in an art gallery in Santa Fe because something was so breathtakingly beautiful.
I’ve cried looking at the landscape.
I’ve cried learning about the history of the Indigenous peoples whose lands I’ve been traveling through.
And all the while I’ve thought:
How extraordinary that I get to be here for this.
That I’m here present in my life.
It’s not something I take for granted.
Because that woman who arrived in Boise? She’s not the same one who left.
โAnd none of it would be possible without this work.
Love and Blessings,
โ
P.S. Next week, I’ll share what’s ahead, the plans, the offers and the next chapter.
But for now, I’d love to ask:
What landscapes are you navigating? And who do you want to be on the other side of it?
Comment and tell me. I read every one.
โ
