How the soil of my childhood once marked by abuse has become the ground where others now come to heal.
The Land that Holds Both My Wounds and My Healing
There is a house and a piece of land that has carried me my whole life.
It is the house I grew up in.
It is the land where my childhood joy unfolded.
And it is also the place where my innocence was broken, where abuse carved itself into my body and soul.
For years I wanted to run from it. To leave it behind.
But life, in its strange way, brought me back.
And now, this very land is where I hold space for others.
It is where we gather for retreats.
It is where people come to shed old skins, to heal, to return to themselves.
This has not been simple.
The land itself has tested me.
Its ownership is still uncertain, caught in a long waiting.
At times it has felt as though the soil was asking me: “Will you endure? Will you tend me even without guarantee?”
And in that waiting, I have learned patience.
I have learned that belonging is not given by papers, but by presence.
I have learned that the earth remembers
every wound, every tear, every step
and yet it offers itself again when we meet it with honesty.
The deeper truth is that this land already knows me.
It knows my grief. It knows my tears.
It knows the long nights where I lay awake as a child, afraid.
It knows the mornings I now rise to greet circles of people seeking healing.
It knows both my wound and my medicine.
I’ve come to see that I am not here to conquer the land, or even to “win” it.
I am here to steward it.
To let the soil itself become an ally in transformation.
To let what once held secrecy and pain become a place of truth and belonging.
The lesson this land teaches me, again and again, is patience.
Endurance. Responsibility.
It asks me to tend it steadily, even when the outcome is unclear.
It asks me to stand in truth without bitterness,
and to remember that healing doesn’t mean erasing what happened
it means giving it a place, so life can flow again.
This is what I know now:
The land we inherit whether through birth, or blood, or experience always comes with stories.
Some bright. Some broken.
And if we are willing, we can become the ones who rewrite them.
Not by forgetting,
but by living differently on the same ground.
The ground of my childhood abuse is the same ground where people now sit in circle,
finding their way back to love.
And maybe that is the deepest kind of justice there is.
Closing reflection
We each carry landscapes like this inner or outerwhere pain and possibility live side by side. Some of us return to ancestral soil, others to the geography of memory within our own bodies. The question is not whether the land is marked by suffering, but whether we are willing to stand there with it, to tend it, to let it teach us endurance and truth.
Perhaps you, too, have a place that holds both your wound and your healing. A house, a body, a family line, a memory. What would it mean to meet it again with new eyes? To let it know you not only as the child who was hurt, but as the one who chose to heal?
When we do this, the land shifts. The story shifts. And in that subtle change, life begins to flow again not only for us, but for those who come after.
