A BEAUTIFUL NIGHTMARE: Valaterra - A Place Where Grief Turned Into Grace

By Antonio Pantoja 

Some places don’t feel discovered. They feel chosen.

Valaterra rests quietly in LaGrange, Kentucky, surrounded by trees and the hush of a landscape that seems to understand the difference between noise and meaning. You do not arrive at Valaterra like you arrive at a venue. You arrive the way you arrive at a memory. The air shifts. Your shoulders drop. Even your voice lowers, not out of fear, but out of reverence.

Before you ever learn the story, you can feel it. Something sacred happened here.

Something unfinished. Something that refused to disappear. 

The land belonged to a woman named Valerie. The home, the mission, the dream of what Valaterra would become, it began with her. She purchased the land and imagined it not as a private escape, but as a refuge. A retreat space where people could step away from the weight of the world and remember what it feels like to breathe without bracing.

But Valerie did not get to stay long enough to see the vision completed. “Unfortunately, she passed away prior to the completion of the sanctuary you’re standing in now,” Kendall Perkins, Executive Director, tells me. “She left this beautiful legacy in the hands of her friends to kind of push it through the finish line, create the documents, create the foundation.”

It would be easy to leave the story there. Another dream interrupted. Another good person taken too soon. But what came after is what makes Valaterra more than land, more than property, more than a location someone can rent. Valaterra became a promise kept.

Valerie’s friends and loved ones stepped in and carried out what she started. They did the unglamorous work. The paperwork. The structure. The stewardship. Not because anyone asked them to, but because love does not like unfinished things. Because when someone builds a dream with their whole heart, the people who loved them cannot bear to let it collapse into silence.

Kendall describes what they preserved in one simple line. “An intentional, magical space for people to retreat.”

It can be difficult to explain what that “magic” is without reducing it to slogans. But Valaterra’s magic is not decorative. It is not staged wellness. It is not spirituality as a performance. It feels older than that. Like the land knows what pain sounds like and doesn’t flinch when you bring yours.

When I ask Kendall where the original vision came from, her answer lands like a line from a film. “I think Valerie was called to this land, and I think this land called her.” That one sentence changes everything.

Suddenly, this is not just a woman who bought property. This is a woman who answered something. A pull. A whisper she trusted. And now, years later, the whisper is still there, but it belongs to everyone.

Valaterra is community-run, but not in the trendy buzzword sense. Not as a marketing angle. It is real.

When I ask Kendall what that means, she laughs. “Well, day-to-day the community is me,” she says, “and my board members, and the different types of crews that we have to come out to work on the space.” Then she widens it into the larger truth. “But when I think about what it means for community here every day, it’s the practitioners that choose the space to host a retreat,” she says. “Or it’s a nonprofit to bring their staff or their volunteers or even their clientele to come for respite.”

That’s the difference between a venue and a sanctuary. Valaterra doesn’t run on traffic. It runs on intention. “The community portion is really run by everybody who’s never been here,” Kendall says, “and knows how magical the space is.” A place sustained by testimony. By one person telling another, “Go there. You’ll feel it.”

“And telling their friends and family, and sharing their experiences online,” Kendall adds. “So all of that’s part of the reason why we are such a lovely community.”

Then we get to the landmark everyone talks about: the teepee. Not the kind you buy in a store, but a structure built to belong. Kendall calls it a spiritual object, an art object, and a community object. “I consider it to be all three.”

It began with a walk Valerie took with her best friend, Rhonda, who is now president of the board. They wandered deep onto the property and eventually reached a clearing in the trees. “And she got to a clearing in the trees and thought just how magical the space was,” Kendall explains. Valerie loved that clearing. She returned to it. It became something sacred to her, a center point on the land.

So when the community later spoke about building something that could embody the spirit of the retreat, the answer had already been waiting. They built the teepee there. And they built it in a way that feels like devotion.

“We didn’t want any kind of commercial product to go into it,” Kendall says. “So the guys went and harvested all the wood from the land.” That detail matters. Because it reveals the philosophy of Valaterra. This place is not trying to overpower nature. It’s trying to honor it. The land gave its own material to create a space where the land itself could be experienced differently. They placed it close enough to the home so most people can access it and enjoy it, and that matters too. Healing should never be gated behind difficulty. Sanctuary should not require a test. 

Then Kendall tells me about the labyrinth, and this is where Valaterra becomes more than beautiful. It becomes human. “Yes, the labyrinth is a big component to what we offer out here,” she says.

A women’s group came for a weekend retreat, not for luxury, but to confront real trauma. The kind that lives in the body long after the mind tries to move on. The facilitator asked them to walk to the creek and pick up a physical object, something small that could represent what they were ready to release. A stone. A gem. A stick. They carried it with them back to the labyrinth.

Once there, the facilitator invited them to set the item down, a symbolic letting go. A gesture of trust. But what Kendall remembers most is the moment that proves how complicated healing really is. “They had had such a magical experience that they didn’t want to let go of anything.” That sentence might be the most honest thing anyone can say about grief.

Even when we want peace, we still cling. We hold onto pain because it has been with us so long that it starts to feel stitched into us. We hold onto trauma because releasing it can feel like erasing the past. So the facilitator teased them gently. Made it light. Made it safe. It’s okay. You don’t have to leave the rock if you’re not ready.

And that is the spiritual heartbeat of Valaterra. It doesn’t demand transformation. It offers it. It doesn’t shame you for holding on. It gives you a place to loosen your grip. If Valaterra has a message, it is not “come here to be fixed.” It is “come here to be met.” You do not have to be healed to arrive. You just have to show up. That’s why this place feels different. Because it was born from the one thing that unites every human being on earth. Loss.

Valaterra exists because a woman loved a dream enough to begin building it. And when she could not finish, others loved her enough to keep it alive. Not as a business decision, but as a promise. In that sense, Valerie is still here. Not as a ghost. Not as a myth. As a presence.In the clearing. In the teepee. In the labyrinth. In every conversation that happens between strangers who came here carrying something heavy.

And here is the most redeeming part of all. Valaterra is not a place where people come to escape life. It’s a place where people come back to themselves. To remember what stillness feels like. To remember what peace feels like. To remember that healing does not always look like victory.

Sometimes healing looks like sitting in the trees and finally admitting you’re tired. Sometimes it looks like crying by a creek. Sometimes it looks like holding a stone and not being ready to drop it yet. Sometimes it looks like walking one slow step forward and realizing you are still alive. That is what makes Valaterra sacred.

Not because it is perfect. Because it is honest. Because it welcomes the messy parts of us. Because it proves love can outlive a life. That devotion can build shelter from grief. That community can turn loss into tenderness.

And if you listen closely enough when you walk the property, you can almost hear the land whisper the same invitation it once gave Valerie. Come here. Rest. Leave what you can. Carry what you must. But do not carry it alone.

Pictured: Kendall Perkins - Executive Directorwww.valaterra.org