LA CASITA ⋆˙⟡˙⋆ Sacred Skin Alchemy comes home

THERE ARE STILL THINGS EVERYWHERE

not boxes everywhere, not chaos, not unfinished in the way that makes you feel like you’re waiting for your life to start.

i’m working. clients are here. the bed is made and the towels are warm and the lights go down and the music plays and somehow every day people walk through the door and I get to put my hands on them and do the thing I came here to do.

it’s functional.

it’s just not done.

there are things sitting in places i know they don’t belong. things leaning against walls waiting for me to decide what they are. little collections forming and then moving somewhere else. I keep putting something somewhere and walking past it for three days and realizing no, you don’t live there.

I don’t want to rush it. I don’t want to fill a wall because there is a wall. I don’t want to buy something because there is an empty corner. I don’t want to make every room make sense yet. I want to see where things want to live.

I think every version of Sacred Skin Alchemy has been me getting a little bit closer to something I didn’t know I was looking for.

the first space was just the beginning. tiny and mine and enough. I needed four walls and a door I could close and somewhere to put a treatment bed and my hands and all of these ideas I didn’t know what to do with yet.

and then somehow people came.

and kept coming.

and it grew.

and I grew.

and we moved.

the last space was so beautiful. I need to say that because I don’t want to rewrite its story just because this one feels different. I loved it. I was proud of it. I made beautiful things there. I met people there who changed me. I watched this work become bigger and stranger and more itself there.

but it always felt like transition.

even when everything was hung and styled and finished, there was something about it that felt like I had set my bags down somewhere I wasn’t going to stay forever.

I didn’t know where I was going.

I just knew, somewhere underneath everything, that I wasn’t there yet.

and then there was this house.

a literal house.

rooms and a kitchen and a bathroom and old windows and light coming in and a front room that didn’t know what it was yet.

a casita.

of course.

of fucking course it was a house.

I’ve spent years trying to build a studio that felt like home and apparently the answer was embarrassingly literal.

get a house.

and now people are coming in and something is happening that I didn’t really expect. they feel it. I’ve watched people walk through the door and stop. I’ve watched faces change.

there have been tears. there have been those conversations that somehow only happen when someone is under a blanket with their eyes closed and neither of us have anything to perform. people have fallen deeply asleep. people have stayed after. we’ve stood in the front room talking long after the treatment was technically over.

i’m watching people let things go in here already and every time someone does, it feels like they leave a little something behind.

not the heaviness of it.

the love.

the trust.

the care it takes to let another person hold you for a little while.

it’s accumulating.

which is maybe why the house already feels so lived in even though half of the things inside of it haven’t figured out where they live yet.

there is already so much tenderness in these rooms.

it has only been a couple weeks and somehow it already feels held, or maybe like it’s holding us, I don’t know.

I’m trying not to explain everything anymore.

I’m trying to let things be what they are before I decide what they mean.

and I’m trying to do the same thing with the house.

I don’t entirely know how I want us to live here yet. I do know I want you to come in and put your things down.

I know I don’t want you to feel like you’re sitting in a waiting room.

I know I want the kitchen to actually be a kitchen.

I know I want my girls here.

I know I want friends on the couch.

I know I want people gathered around something someone is teaching us.

I know I want beautiful things everywhere but I don’t want things everywhere.

I know I want the boutique to feel like finding something rather than being sold something.

I know I want the things inside of it to have lives before they get here.

a skincare line from Oaxaca that I found because I went looking for one thing and came home obsessed with ten others.

makeup made by Irán, who I met once at a market and somehow found again months later because I was lost in the rain.

clothes I touched in Mexico City and immediately started imagining on someone back home.

things I’m about to find in Japan that I don’t know exist yet.

people

places

stories

hands

I want to be able to tell you where everything came from and if I can’t find the right thing for a particular shelf yet, then the shelf can be empty.

it’s okay.

I think I’m finally learning that empty space isn’t something I have to fix. so the casita is becoming herself very slowly and I am letting her.

friends are helping me with things. things keep moving. displays are changing. plants are finding windows. products are finding shelves. the treatment room is rearranging itself around us.

meanwhile I’m taking clients.

we’re already living here,

that’s the funny part.

there isn’t going to be some morning where I unlock the door and suddenly the house begins.

it already did.

the beginning happened while I was still moving things around. I think that’s what makes this one different.

the other spaces felt like places I had to finish before I could inhabit them. this one feels like it wants to become itself because we’re inhabiting it.

in December we’re going to have a party.

I keep thinking about this part.

the sweetest little cocktail party.

friends and clients and people who have watched me move through every strange iteration of this thing. music. drinks. tiny foods. people sitting on the couch and standing in the kitchen and wandering through rooms. all these people who normally come here one at a time suddenly occupying the house together.

a grand opening, technically.

but really I think it’s a housewarming.

I want to look around and see everyone inside of it. I want to see the house full.

I want to see all of these separate threads of my life in one room together and have that strange moment where something that existed in your head for so long is suddenly physical and noisy and drinking a botanical mocktail in your kitchen.

there is still so much I want to do here.

there are still walls I’m staring at.

there are rooms I haven’t completely understood.

there are things I want to host and teach and learn that I don’t have names for yet.

for once that doesn’t make me feel behind.

it makes me excited!

for a long time I thought growth meant the next thing. bigger, better, more established, more finished and every iteration did bring me closer.

every single one mattered.

but the strangest thing about this one is that I’m not standing inside of it wondering what’s next.

I’m standing inside of it wondering what happens here.

what do we make here?

who comes through this door?

what gets taught here?

what do I bring home?

who do I meet?

what happens to the people who lie on this table and what happens to me because I knew them?

what does this house look like after a year of all of us leaving little pieces of ourselves inside of it?

I don’t know.

I don’t want to know yet.

I just know that the last space, as beautiful as it was, always felt like I was on my way somewhere and this doesn’t.

this tiny casita with things in the wrong places and beautiful light and people already crying in the rooms feels more complete to me unfinished than anything ever did finished.

I thought I was building better and better studios. I wasn’t. I was trying to find my way home.

aqui estamos.