After a 9-mile hilly run along Red Rock Loop Road, my legs begged for mercy. Stretching felt uninspired, so I opted for a cool down hike instead. My destination: the Birthing Cave, a womb-shaped hollow in sandstone whose photo I’d first seen hanging in ChocolaTree—an organic café with a chakra-forward garden and food so pure it absolves you of guilt. I asked the server where it was. She gave me directions, and off I went. The hike wasn’t long, but it wasn’t obvious either. The trail wove through whispering brush and soft red dust. The cave itself was high, shallow, and tilted—less a cave, more a bowl etched into sandstone.

What struck me most was the sound—or rather, its absence. Just birdsong, wind, and the faint, resigned exhale of a road too far to intrude. I sat for thirty minutes, maybe more. Long enough to imagine what the Yavapai people once did here. Perhaps they told stories of birth from the rock itself—first breaths taken in this sandstone cradle, the Earth laboring her children into being.

Then, the silence cracked.

She came scrambling up the rocks, breathless and apologetic. “Sorry to disturb your peace,” she said. But peace, like all things, is temporary—and sometimes, interruption feels like relief.

Her name was Angela. She wore a white long-sleeved shirt—ill-suited to Sedona’s rust-red dust but ideal for reflecting Arizona’s searing sun—and simple sneakers, not trail shoes. She had already logged six or seven miles that day. She carried a small notebook with trail instructions written by hand: past the tree, over the rock, left at the cactus. In her shirt pocket: a random collection of trail trash—bottle caps, plastic scraps, remnants of other people’s forgetfulness. It suited her energy: scrappy, disheveled, deeply sincere. We talked—about trails, red dust, and the weight of her work. A lawyer in New York specializing in reproductive health, she had come to the Birthing Cave—fittingly—for renewal. To remember why her work matters. I listened as she shared some of the cases she handles.

Angela gave me one last smile as she hiked down. “Sorry again for disturbing your peace,” she said.

Birthing Cave | Sedona

Cigar Factory | Charleston

Keeper of the Gate | Charleston