Deer Island

Deer Island carries the quiet, held energy of a place that was once land apart – a hill encircled by tidal water and tule marsh. That island quality lingers: the site feels like a natural energetic cocoon, protected and self-contained, lifted just above the wide flatness of the baylands. Visitors often sense a deep stillness beneath the birdsong, and a connection to the generations who crossed the sloughs to reach this dry ground. The site supports journey work and transitions, its energy encouraging the release of what no longer serves and a settling into slower, older rhythms.

Deer Island is a small oak-crowned knoll rising from the Petaluma River baylands near Novato in Marin County, California – the ancestral territory of the Coast Miwok. Before the surrounding marshes were diked and drained, it was a true island: a dry refuge amid miles of tidal wetland, reachable by tule canoe through a maze of sloughs. Such islands held special status as liminal ground – accessible yet apart – and the baylands sustained Coast Miwok communities for thousands of years, as the shell mounds and village sites recorded around these wetlands attest. The important Coast Miwok village of Olompali lay just a few miles to the north. Today the knoll is protected as the Deer Island Open Space Preserve, its loop trail circling ancient oaks and buckeyes above seasonal wetlands alive with egrets and herons.