The home you take with you

Goodbye Beachwood, I'm entering my snail era

Moving-in day, May 2020

I just moved out of my beloved Beachwood Canyon apartment. Technically, I’ve moved in with my friend, Jen, who lives down the road. But mostly, Jen’s place is a mailing address and a way station of sorts. For the next few weeks, I’m looking after her pups while she’s overseas, and using this time to recalibrate my life.

In early April I will embark on a nomad… year? Two years? Or maybe I’ll be back in LA ready to feather a new nest by September, who knows? I’m a seed on the wind!

I’ve sold or given away all my furniture, put dozens of boxes into storage, and crammed way too many “essentials” into the shelves and drawers Jen cleared out for me. From here, I must downsize even more drastically, to a pair of Briggs and Riley suitcases whose lifetime guarantee I plan to seriously put to the test.

Friends are asking how I feel. Excited? Nervous? In shock? Yes to all of the above, and also curious, receptive, and a little robotic, like I’m just following orders. As a hardcore homebody, I am surprised by my nonchalance.

My most itinerant friend, Penelope, advised me not to think of myself as without a home, but rather to let myself be fully at home everywhere I go.

Like a snail, I thought.

How I pack my shell will be a major factor in how “at home” I’m able to feel while occupying spaces arranged and maintained by other people, and I am ruthlessly appraising every little thing to determine what will make the cut. I can’t take everything that sparks joy. Do I really need it? Would I regret leaving it behind?

I’m paring down my wardrobe to my absolute favorite and most versatile pieces (not easy to factor in all kinds of weather and activities, from sleeping to swimming to public speaking!) but I am carting along my whole five-step skincare routine, which, at fifty-three, honestly feels essential.

My AeroPress weighs nothing and makes damn fine coffee, so that’s in the bag. I’m definitely bringing my collapsible laptop stand and Bluetooth keyboard so I don’t develop a hunchback, and am even considering bringing my bamboo lap desk. I see it as crucial for comfortable writing sessions, especially on random chairs and sofas, but it does weigh three pounds, which is eight percent of my overall weight capacity. Is it more important than my podcasting mic? My yoga mat?

Comfort. Utility. Convenience. These calculations feel impossible when I don’t know how long I’ll be away or exactly where I’m even going.

Is an emotional-support pillow a need?

Yes, I think it is. Home is where you lay your head, right?

I’ve lived in dozens of homes, and out of them all, the one I felt the most at-home in is that little Beachwood pad. The minute I first set foot in that apartment, I heard a voice in my head loud and clear: I want to live here.

High, coved ceilings. A paned picture window streaming with sunlight. Wrought-iron sconces, cute little hexagonal Saltillo tiles in the kitchen… Cozy and bright, it just felt like home.

That was May 2020, a couple of months into lockdown. It was only supposed to be a temporary bolthole. The plan was to buy a place in LA as soon as the pandemic passed and my business stabilized. (Ha.) Instead, I rented there for nearly five years.

Man, I loved that apartment. It’s the first place I lived completely alone—with no partner, no kids or even pets—since the age of nineteen. I loved that it was all mine, set up and styled to please me and no one else.

A home is a machine for living in. A container for the body, or an extension of the body, but also a body itself, in a way. Maybe a home is the body of your activities.

On my moving-out day, I ceremoniously walked through all its spaces, ran my hands over its surfaces. Here is the deep, white sink where I washed my dishes every morning, eyes on the pinking sky above the palm trees behind the house. There is the dining room that was my home office for years, later reclaimed for its intended purpose for a short stretch before evolving into a makeshift painting studio. The mint-green bathroom where I filled a nightly tub with epsom salts and prayers. That spot against the living room’s south wall, where I sat on the sofa and took the call that altered my world: It’s cancer. And this slim channel of space where I slept, and didn’t sleep, and sweated, and swallowed pills, and carefully lowered my feet to the floor seventeen hundred times.

Sure, I lived alone here, but I had a steady companion in this wood, this plaster, this tile that supported me, watched over me. I was self-contained here; a self within a self, a body within a body.

Moving out feels like taking that body off life support. With every box packed, every painting unhung, the space loses a little more of its personhood, until what’s left is just an empty shell. It could be anyone’s home. It’s not mine, not me, anymore.

Eight months before I moved into this place, I sold my Vancouver house, where I’d lived for nearly a decade. It was crammed to the rafters with useful and sentimental things I would not be taking with me to Los Angeles. That was a damn big downsizing, from a two-story house to a small moving truck. Like now, I was in transition at the time, with no way to know what I would need or have room for, so I put my gut instinct in charge of the purge—eenie meenie miney mo, this comes with, that must go.

When the time came to reclaim my things from storage and move them into Beachwood, I was mildly shocked to find that every item I’d intuitively selected had a perfect place in my new apartment, down to the last little trinket. Nothing was missing, nothing was wasted. I had everything I needed, including extra space to hold what was to come.

I’m trying to bear that in mind as I’m packing my suitcases and deciding what to put into storage, what to let go of.

I don’t know exactly where I’m going to be, or what I’m equipping myself for on this journey. I don’t know what I’m going to find most useful or comforting along the way, or what I’ll need when I eventually set up a home again.

But there are some things I do know:

I know my spirit is an excellent forward planner. It can see around corners, and doesn’t bother me with all the details. I can trust its marching orders.

I know it feels right to travel light. For now.

I know I’m putting writing and connection at the center of my life in the coming year, and for that, I don’t need a sofa, a VitaMix, or even a bed of my own.

I do need three things in abundance: New scenery. Freedom from the responsibilities of home management, from the rut of cozy routines. And a clear, open mind, with plenty of white space to hold what’s to come.

Oh, and I need community, too, so I hope you’ll join me on this journey. And if I come through your town, maybe you’ll let me borrow your yoga mat. I’ll make you a damn fine coffee in return.

Moving-out day, March 2025

Where’s Maggie?

Now: Jen’s apartment, Franklin Village, Los Angeles

Next: Vancouver, April 2-9

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Recovering my writing has restarted my life (after 50!)

Beachwood Canyon is where I recovered from creative paralysis and started writing again. Or, started writing seriously for the first time. It’s where I started this Substack, where I started writing the book I will (hopefully!) complete while on the road this year.

My writing is the biggest gift I’ve received from this phase of life, and although I guess I revived it intentionally, it also came as a bit of a surprise. I’ve always had artistic aspirations, and obviously I’ve been working with words for decades as an editor and publisher, but to be honest, for the longest time I thought I was creatively broken. I thought I had nothing worth saying and no discipline or talent with which to say it.

Until I put my essential self in charge of my creative process.

That shift was the product of training as a Wayfinder life coach, and it has taken on a life of its own. Now I work one-on-one with blocked writers, frustrated creatives, and everyday people who always wanted to write but never got around to it. Who fear that their creative life, their best true life, is dying on the vine.

Have you ever flipped through your old journals and noticed how much repetition is in their pages? This is the year I ______! I’m so sick of _______. Will I ever _______?

My friend, it is not too late to change the script, the scenery, the character arc of your life.

I am noticing a pattern in my clients; one I used to see in myself, too. They want to strategize their way back to their creativity. They want to pick the right project, the right schedule, the right rules and self-imposed consequences, believing that this will motivate them to stick with it.

It doesn’t work. Not when we charge at it with grim discipline and leave our inner artist, our playfulness, our joy, out of the process.

Last week, I asked one of my clients to close her eyes, recall the time in her life when she was writing most freely. Before this sense of running out of time, knuckling under, racing to catch up to her ebbing potential, took over. Back when she was hungry to write, when writing was not a chore or a reminder of past failed projects, but a delicious treat she could not wait to get back to.

I asked her to recall the specific place where she wrote, not just to remember it but to time-travel back to that spare bedroom cluttered with papers and ashtrays, where she built towering poems, word by word, deep into the night. From inside that long-ago thrilling moment, I asked her to describe aloud what is happening in her body and mind.

It feels like playing the piano, she said. Time is stretchy. It’s like I’m digging into my most essential self. The poem is like a puzzle that I’m obsessed with solving. It feels like flying.

This. This is what is waiting for you inside the abandoned chambers of your creativity. You may not have opened the door to those rooms for years, but I promise you are carrying them around within you. They are filled with treasures. And you can step back inside any time.

I adore this work so much.

I’m currently opening up four more spots for one-on-one coaching. If this calls to you, apply to coach with me and we’ll have a quick call to see if it’s a fit.

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Meet me at Kripalu in April!

Words That Heal is an inspiring and informative publishing workshop expressly designed for healers, therapists, and coaches.

I’m co-presenting it with my friend, Ruby Warrington, the best-selling author of Sober Curious and Women Without Kids, in-person retreat at Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health (in Stockbridge, Mass.) from April 25-27.

Tuition is just $399 plus the cost of accommodation.

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