As the 20th century careened towards the finishing line, author Victress Hitchcock moved with her husband of 25 years from their familiar urban world to a 160-acre historic ranch in the Wet Mountains, a range in the Colorado Rockies so remote no one they knew had ever heard of it. Within months, their lives unraveled, and out of the wreckage a path opened to a radically new way to be in the world, broken hearted and ready to meet whatever was to come with insight, horse sense, and humor. 

A Tree With My Name On It: Finding a Way Home is not a handbook on healing trauma. It is a living, breathing, messy story of one woman trying her hardest to free her wounded heart and uncover her true self. 

It is a story, filled with joy and sorrow, unexpected wisdom, and raunchy humor that will resonate with anyone who has reached that moment in their lives when they are ready to tear off the bandage, and take a deep look at the old wounds, lifelong assumptions and fears that have been holding them hostage for too long. 

“A beautiful poem of a memoir about what it means to be an American woman, an engaged Buddhist, and a fully alive, open-hearted human being.” Brad Wetzler, Author: Into the Soul of the World, My Journey to Healing 

As the 20th century careened towards the finishing line, author Victress Hitchcock moved with her husband from their familiar urban world to a 160-acre historic ranch in the Colorado Rockies. Within months, their lives unraveled, and out of the wreckage a radically new path emerged. 

Guided by a rich concoction of Buddhist insight and horse sense, and a deep friendship with a woman born on the ranch, Victress began a journey that shattered old defenses, and loosened the grip of the lifelong fears that bound her. 

A Tree With My Name On It: Finding a Way Home is not a handbook on healing trauma. It is a living, breathing, messy story of one woman trying her hardest to free her wounded heart and uncover her true self. 

It is a story, filled with joy and sorrow, unexpected wisdom, and humor that will resonate with anyone who has reached that moment in their lives when they are ready to tear off the bandage, and take a deep look at the old wounds, assumptions and fears that have held them hostage for too long. 

“A riveting and intimate tale of a woman's journey in search of a home, in her body, in her spirit and in the land. I couldn't put it down...” Tsultrim Allione, Author ––Wisdom Rising: Journey into the Mandala of the Sacred Feminine 

Victress Hitchcock grew up in London, Paris and Madrid as the daughter of a diplomat. She graduated from the London Film School in 1972 and began a 45-year career making award winning documentary and educational films. At the age of 72, she began writing a memoir. A Tree with My Name on It: Finding a Way Home is being published by Bold Story Press, a woman’s hybrid press, for release October 16, 2024. 

Victress lives in Colorado, teaches writing and contemplation workshops, is a long-time meditator in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition and is an ordained Buddhist teacher. 

Born into a globetrotting foreign service family after WWII, Victress began her adventures at four. By the age of ten, she’d called London, Paris, and Madrid home. An only child, she developed resilience and a curiosity about the world, and found solace in books. 

After graduating from Holton Arms School for Girls, she went off to the University of Colorado, but after a year of tuning in and turning on, she dropped out and traveled to her parents’ serendipitous new post – Calcutta, India in 1967. There, she volunteered with Mother Teresa, taught English to Tibetan refugees, explored the Himalayas, and encountered the world of Tibetan Buddhism. 

While studying at the London Film School, a chance encounter with Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche in 1972 ignited her Buddhist practice. She became a founding member of Centre Productions, a film company he established in Boulder, Colorado and began her career as a filmmaker. During this time, she married and raised two children. 

In 1985, she launched her own company, Chariot Productions, creating award winning documentaries and educational films on social issues like addiction, gangs, and HIV/AIDS, for PBS and Discovery Education. Some are available for free on her Vimeo channel. 

A 2005 pilgrimage with Tsoknyi Rinpoche to remote Eastern Tibet was the basis for a feature documentary – "Blessings: The Tsoknyi Nangchen Nuns of Tibet." Her next film "When the Iron Bird Flies: Tibetan Buddhism Arrives in the West," continued her commitment to bringing the Buddhist teachings to audiences around the world. Both films are available on Amazon and other streaming programs. In 2013, she was ordained as a Buddhist teacher. 

Writing has always been her creative companion. After years of crafting screenplays, poems, and journals, she embarked on a full-time writing journey in 2017. This led to poetry collections and workshops that blend writing with contemplative practices. 

In 2019, she began work on a long-gestating memoir. "A Tree with My Name on It: Finding a Way Home" explores an intense transformative two years living on a remote ranch, a time of personal upheaval and profound rediscovery. The book, published by Bold Story Press, to be released in the fall 2024, is a rich explorations of outer and inner landscapes observed through the lens of a contemplative and fearless eye. 

“Those who have the good fortune to call Victress a true friend know that she is someone who lives life with an open heart and with courage. A Tree with My Name on It: Finding a Way Home invites us to learn about her life–– an authentic story of a person living in this world as well as a heroine’s journey to self-discovery. It is both inspiring and engaging.”

Anam Thubten, Buddhist teacher and author–– No Self, No Problem, The Magic of Awareness, and Into the Haunted Ground: A Guide to Cutting the Root of Suffering. 

“This beautifully rendered memoir tells the story of Victress Hitchcock’s two years on a remote ranch in a Rocky Mountain valley, home to harsh winters, and equally tough, big-hearted characters. A skilled storyteller and chronicler of human relationships, she tells us in lyrical prose and unexpected humor, how she boldly pulled back layer after layer of built-up armor around her heart leaving an opening wide enough for tenderness to emerge. A poem of a memoir about what it means to be an American woman, an engaged Buddhist, and a fully alive, open-hearted human being.”

Brad Wetzler, Author ––Into the Soul of the World, My Journey to Healing 

“A riveting intimate tale of a woman's journey in search of a home, in her body, in her spirit and in the land. A Tree with My Name on It is a vividly written, heart wrenching deep dive into life itself in all its beauty and complexity. I couldn't put it down and, in the end, I felt deeply enriched and touched by her honesty and wise heart.”

Tsultrim Allione, Author ––Wisdom Rising: Journey into the Mandala of the Sacred Feminine 

“I know the ancient magic of the Wet Mountains where Victress Hitchcock lived at Lookout Valley Ranch, and the warmth and wisdom of the neighbors and friends that we shared. With A Tree with My Name on It: Finding a Way Home, she tells her story of that time and place with candor and courage. Her memoir is as compelling and profound as the rugged and spacious landscape that inspired it.”

Carol Ann Wilson, Author ––Still Point of the Turning World: The Life of Gia-fu Feng 

“Compelling and beautifully written, this spiritual memoir is the courageous account of a woman’s transformation while living on a remote Colorado mountain ranch. Both inspiring and heart rending, Victress brings you along on her extraordinary journey -- a powerful story about healing, resilience, and finding inner freedom.” 

Olivia Ames Hoblitzelle, Author –– Ley Lines of Love: Adventures Along the Spiritual Path 

“In this vibrantly woven reflection about inner healing, Victress allows us to experience her grief and the wounds caused by childhood tragedy in a vulnerable and open-hearted way. She opens up the reservoir of pain enabling the reader to experience the transformation that unfolds through her newfound relationship with herself and acceptance of life, as it is. Her presence is as solid as the tree that stands amidst the aspen and pines with her name on it.” 

Irma Velasquez, Author ––Fish Dreams: A Mother’s Journey from Curing Her Son’s Autism to Loving Him as He Is 

“A Tree with My Name on It is a heartrending tale of more than survival in a wilderness. The author takes us along her path of self-discovery in an unknown wild space on a ranch in Colorado. It is an identity crisis of later life, a heroic journey that inspires through tough and beautiful times. She is a friend telling us how it was, a storyteller of the soul, allowing us to also find our inner strength. I thank her.” 

Karen Roberts, Author––The Blossoming of Women, A Workbook on Growing from Older to Elder 

“A heart-wrenching and healing story that embraces pain and joy in equal measures. Victress weaves a powerful tale that draws you in, inviting you to be deeply engaged in her journey of self-discovery. Her story is one of profound wounds that alter her life in an inescapable way. I was moved deeply at the way she learns to embrace her pain, to confront the agony of her trauma and to love both the woman she is and the woman she aspires to become. A truly incredible story.”

Jesse Rene Gibbs, Author ––Girl Hidden 

“A Tree with My Name on It is a raw, courageous, and initiatory memoir for our times, a beautifully written account full of pain, liberation, compassion, and wisdom. This is the story of a woman who stood at the edge of the abyss and didn't blink. In a compelling narrative start to finish, the author insightfully intertwines her journey of loss, healing, and transformation with the adventures and challenges of ranch life in the mountains of Southern Colorado, working with horses and teaching meditation to prisoners in a nearby Federal Prison.”

Fleet Maull, Author ––Radical Responsibility and Dharma in Hell, founder of Prison Dharma Network. 

“A Tree with My Name on It: Finding A Way Home brings us into a wild, unpredictable adventure on a ranch in the mountains of Colorado. Readers are welcomed into this world with beautifully rendered details of the struggles and joys and challenges… gems of wisdom are sprinkled throughout. The author’s inner search for home is very familiar and I benefited greatly from reading this poignant journey. Bravo for all of us to have such a guide.” 

Judy Vasos, Author––My Dear Good Rosi: Letters from Nazi Occupied Holland 1940-1943 

“This is a book that can’t be put down. Hitchcock’s commanding storytelling, the weaving of her life, the humans who touch her tender soul, the horses who help to heal her heart and the ever-changing landscape of the valley together create a profound and transformative tale.”

Jackie Ashley, LPC, BC-DMT, ACS, ESMHL––Somatic and Equine Facilitated Therapist 

What drew you to the Wet Mountains of Colorado? 

It was pure serendipity. My husband and I were contemplating moving out of Denver. We had one more year before we became empty nesters. I had begun riding horses again after thirty-five years, so a ranch seemed like a great idea. Neither of us had ever heard of the Wet Mountains before we read the classified ad for an 1870 historied homestead on 160 acres in the Wet Mountains. 

How did your move to the Wet Mountains change your life? 

When Joe and I moved to Lookout Valley Ranch, our marriage of twenty-five years was hanging by a thread. We had the notion that moving to the middle of nowhere, way out of our comfort zone, could revive it. In the beginning, Joe was enamored of the place, its beauty and history. I was terrified of bears, isolation, winter. Once we started living there, it all changed. For Joe, it had been love at first sight, but once the honeymoon was over, the reality of living so far from people, grocery stores, movie theaters and in a place with four-foot snowstorms, became a nightmare. For me, it was like an arranged marriage. I grew to love it. I had a horse, I made friends with the neighbors, I found that the solitude deepened me. And I started writing. After a year, Joe left and moved to Los Angeles and I stayed another year at the ranch, alone. 

Berna Finley plays a significant role in your memoir. How did you first meet Berna? 

I met Berna when she drove up to the ranch, on a whim, from Florence, a nearby town, where she was attending a memorial for her mother. Berna had been born at the ranch in the 1930s and had always loved it. Having to leave it when her father died was a heartbreak she carried her whole life. She had come for the memorial from her home in Massachusetts and she just wanted to see the ranch before going home. She wasn’t expecting to find anyone living there. I was outside, carrying a load of laundry I had just taken off the line when she pulled up. I invited her in, and we connected immediately. I felt like she was a lifeline to my finding a way to make the ranch my home. When we discovered we were both writers, we began sharing our writing about the ranch. Her essays were about her joy at living there and her sadness at having to leave. Mine were about my fears of surviving there and my gradual opening to the unfamiliar new life I was living. 

What was your motivation for writing A Tree with My Name on It? 

Initially, Berna and I had a plan to put together a book of the essays we emailed each other about our experiences living at the ranch fifty years apart. The intention was to honor the history and extraordinary beauty of the ranch and the Wet Mountains, and to celebrate all that we learned about living there through our friendship. It became much deeper than that as we became closer and common themes of childhood traumas emerged, and finally, through Berna’s diagnosis with cancer and her death coinciding with my having to leave the ranch. 

How long did it take you to write the book, and what kind of research was involved? 

I had been carrying the idea of the book with me since leaving the ranch. When I retired from filmmaking, I realized it was time to jump in and start writing it. I began in 2019, but I found myself going around in circles for a year. Finally, on an impulse, I googled “Memoir Coach in Boulder, Colorado” and up popped Brad Wetzler. After an initial phone chat, I sent him what I had written, and he read it and was on-board. He coached me on the basics of memoir writing and instructed me to pull all the elements of the book together in a Scrivener project and start from the beginning. 

The work of bringing all the bits and pieces of the story together on Scrivener was a big help. There are multiple themes, with multiple elements that needed to be braided together in the book. The main elements that formed the basis for the research I needed to do for the book included the journals I kept, essays I sent to Berna and hers to me, a published book by Berna’s mother about the years they lived at the ranch and a few other odds and ends. 

You say the only way to open your heart is to let it break. How did this manifest in your life? 

I once saw a psychic/intuitive. It was just after I had left the ranch. One of the first things he told me was that I was a “heart person” who had spent my whole life protecting my heart with a hard shell. He went on to say that I had just cracked open my heart, and from then on, my path would become more and more about connecting with my feelings and intuition. It made sense to me. 

When I turned forty, I began to shift away from being someone with a strong mind and very little connection to my heart or body. It began with waking up my body, first through water aerobics and then through horseback riding. I began unlocking my hypervigilant neck and shoulder muscles. I became aware that, for years, my throat had been closed, keeping my breath left out for long periods of time before breathing in. At the time, I didn’t know that all of it was related to sexual and childhood trauma. I had shut down my body in order to not feel things I didn’t want to experience. Waking up my body included beginning to allow myself to feel my emotions . . . mostly fear was what was holding me tight. My heart softened to my own suffering, to the ways I had been damaged, and I let myself feel it. I understood that for me to move forward through the sadness and fear, I had to let my heart completely break. The Leonard Cohen line describes it perfectly: There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in. 

Healing from a difficult childhood and, as you said, sexual trauma is a part of your story. How did you face the fear and shame that came to light during your time at the ranch? 

At the heart of the Tibetan Buddhist teachings is the idea of embracing the difficulties, the pain, the challenges and sorrows of our lives . . . not ignoring them or demonizing them or trying to keep them at arm’s length. It is a radical approach. I had been hiding out, disassociating, numbing with alcohol and inappropriate sexual relations for years and that had done nothing to heal the pain. Being alone at the ranch, I was able to turn toward the wounds from childhood and sexual trauma, not shut them out. Years of Buddhist practice and teachings on loving kindness came into play. Loving kindness always starts with ourselves and, in my case, being kind to myself started with acknowledging what had happened, what I had experienced, and embracing all the hurt and shame and fear I had been avoiding for years. 

As a practicing Tibetan Buddhist, how did your daily meditation help with your healing process? 

Daily meditation practice is a way of getting to know ourselves. It allows us to relax and open to whatever arises moment by moment in our minds and to let what arises, disappear. What you notice is that if you don’t reinforce and try to solidify what arises, everything always changes. You become familiar with that constant movement. The word meditation in Tibetan translates as “become familiar with your mind”. Meditation is like a training ground for learning to be more at ease with the challenges we face because sitting there doing nothing you become more aware of how impermanent things really are. We are also shifting our allegiance from our thoughts to awareness, giving everything more space. When we aren’t putting pressure on ourselves to be one way or another, the healing process has more room to unfold. 

How was your relationship with horses a part of your healing process? 

One of the ways we respond to trauma is by freezing, disassociating, and numbing. We leave our bodies. In my case, in my forties, I began to be aware that I basically lived in my head. I had no relationship with my body. I had taken riding lessons as a child, but at twelve, I stopped. What prompted me to start again at forty-five is a mystery, but it began with having vivid dreams of horses. Then I saw a course being offered in a ranch outside of Denver on Natural Horsemanship and I signed up. It was just what I needed. There is virtually no way to ride a horse and be disconnected from your body. One of the ways the body responds to trauma is hypervigilance and, in my case, I had spent years with my neck stuck in a posture of hypervigilance, a rigid combination of holding back and thrusting forward. The first thing I needed to do, once I became aware of it, was to soften that and align my neck and back. Horses are very sensitive, and my fear based frozen body was a signal that something was wrong, so it was important for me to find a way to thaw in order for my horse to relax. Working with a horse is a great way to work with your mind and emotions. The horse becomes a mirror for your state of mind and body. So, the gift I found with riding was that it allowed me to see how I solidified my mind and body and how it all worked better when I could loosen my grip and become more flexible both physically and mentally/emotionally. That was healing. 

What part did the meditation group you led in the Federal prison play in your book and in your life at the ranch? 

Volunteering to lead a weekly meditation group at the Federal prison in Florence, a town twenty-five miles from the ranch was a lifesaver. It gave me a connection to others, and it strengthened my own meditation practice. I value the practice of engaged Buddhism, and I believe Buddhism in action is an important addition to the contemplative, sitting practice of meditation. Finding ways to engage men in a prison setting with the teachings of Buddhism without it seeming foreign or religious, had the effect of making my own practice more alive. The men in the group brought fresh minds to the age-old teachings on suffering and impermanence. We taught each other. And just going every week kept me from falling into self-pitying and despair during the year I lived alone at the ranch. The group kept me on my toes. Touching into the interactions of the group throughout the book was also a good way to include the Buddhist teachings in a way that was integrated with the story. 

What did you learn from your time in the Wet Mountains? 

I learned I could do it. I could handle so much more than I thought possible. I could break out of my comfort zone and face the outer challenges of living in a remote mountain valley, alone. I made it through the winter. I did things I never thought I could do like plowing snow with a three-quarter ton truck, taking care of a wounded horse, rounding up stray cattle. These were all new and unfamiliar experiences. On the inner level, I found that facing my fears, and finding patience with myself and others, allowed me to experience everything in my life more fully. Fully experiencing the sadness that I had been keeping at bay for so many years, opened the doors to finding joy in many unexpected moments. Letting go of old judgments and opinions about how things should be, freed me in ways I didn’t expect. I made a relationship with the natural world in ways I never had. That grounded me and gave me confidence in my own heart and its connection with the profound ways of the real unfabricated world.