“This place is like a second home to us,” a guest said to me recently as he and his family were getting to leave after another weekend at Spirit Hill.
I asked him what he liked best about the place, and he told me it was how it made him feel. “It’s so Zen here,” he said. “But that’s not the right word. It’s so…it’s so…”
He searched for the word. “I don’t know,” he finally said. He tapped his heart. “It just feels really good to be here. It’s some sort of reset.”
I like being the person who greets new guests at Spirit Hill because the pictures on the website don’t capture the magic, I believe, that has people coming back year after year. How do you capture the sweet hum of nature? How do you capture the pulsing beauty of a working farm that has seen over a hundred years of sun and rain people eating watermelon on the front porch and singing songs after a long day working the land or, nowadays, lying by the pool? How do you capture a place that has a tight group of people working really, really hard to make sure guests have the best experience possible?
The other day I was walking around the property, and I noticed that Sergio, our hard-working gardener, had left an arrangement of persimmons on a small table under the persimmon tree. I stopped to take a picture—the light was perfect, and once again I marveled that I get to live in a place that inspires people, even those who work here, to acts of reverence, of noticing, of remembering that the pace of life was slower when we were younger, perhaps, and that, even now, we can slow down again and see what is right in front of us: flower, chicken, rock, house, sunlight, ease. Happiness.