The world is confusing right now. (And maybe it always has been). So much turmoil and joy, pain and pleasure, outrage and wonder exist at the same time. This feels true at nearly every scale, from the personal to the global. 

And one’s late thirties can be… weird. I’ve done well enough in my career, but am still searching for my place and purpose in the world. Maybe I thought I had found it, but as life changes, I may have come to realize that this can be a shifting milestone. I am incredibly fortunate to be a mother to a precious and hilarious 4 year old, but I am divorced and in a way, in a process of resetting my life. Where should I live? What kind of relationships should I be pursuing and prioritizing? How can I reclaim many of the things that I’ve neglected in the recent past and put my energies towards helping others and living a purposeful life? 

Things seem to move fast during different eras of life, as they have for me during the last 10 years. In that period, I’ve owned and sold a house; gotten married and divorced; built, lost, and rekindled relationships; experienced the deaths of both parents, all four grandparents, and a beloved dog; earned a Masters degree and pursued a PhD; birthed a child and become a single parent; and moved more than 10 times in 6 vastly different states. All of these internal and individual changes have taken place during the wildly chaotic periods of smartphones becoming addictive staples in all of our pockets, COVID-19 changing the way we live, work, and interact, and racial awakenings and their subsequent white supremacist backlash turning family and friends into people who we no longer feel are compatible with our values. Eek, it’s been a lot. 

Just writing this out makes me realize how desperately I have needed to process. Things have moved so fast… and maybe they’ve moved fast because I have not taken the time to process many of these changes. It had occurred to me in the last year, while I was in the middle of my divorce, and settled into a cozy, yet tiny apartment with my daughter, that I was finally allowing myself to just sit still. When the grief, shock, and emotions tempered, then the dust began to settle. But the second part of this realization was that I may not even know what “the dust settled” looks like. I began to understand that feeling calm, quiet, and present may be an unfamiliar feeling to me.

So here we are – as a reader, you get to participate in my own journey of processing. I’m not sure what will result in the end, but I know we may visit many areas of my life. Parenting? Divorce? Travel? My neglected academic work and current professional work (understanding ongoing impacts of settler colonialism?) Indigenous leadership in conservation and wildlife? Just how fucking cool plants and animals are? Human relationships with nature? Minimalist lifestyles and my current obsession with wool clothing? Relationships? Cooking? Tasty things to eat around Denver? Farming tiny microscopic creatures to transform food into tastier food (fermentation… for the non-nerds out there)? 

I’ll cut myself short on the rambling, and just start building. Thanks for being here; thanks for being part of this; and I’m looking forward to start connecting!