My life has been a journey, and an especially exciting and slightly chaotic one for the last eight years.

I met my husband Nelson on the internet in 2011. And when you’ve found your person, you know it. Soon after, I sold my house in Charlotte NC and moved to Kannapolis NC to live with him.

In 2013 we went on a life-changing 16-day, 225-mile Grand Canyon rafting trip on the Colorado River. I wrote a book about it called “Make Some Room.” Because of that trip, we started asking some BIG questions, which led to these events…

In 2014 we moved to Brevard, NC and got married three months later.
In 2015 we sold a crap-ton of our stuff and moved into a 5th wheel camper on a friend’s farm.

In 2016 we rafted 149 miles of the French Broad River over 13 days. Because of THAT trip, we started asking some other big questions, which then led to these events…

By late 2016, we sold our fifth wheel camper and moved into a short-term rental property.

By July of 2017 we’d shut down our businesses, sold almost everything we owned and bought a motorhome to travel the country. We took various subcontracting jobs (as built site surveyors, campground hosts, workcampers, etc.).

By December of 2018, we had put 20,000 miles on our motorhome and had driven across the US, across Canada, and up and back to Alaska.
Has it been easy? Sometimes yes, a lot of times NO. Has it cost us a lot? YEP. Has it gained us a lot? DOUBLE YEP.

Some of the story is my husband’s to tell.

But my part of the story…

By 2014, I was BURNED OUT. I’d been self-employed since 2003. I’d made three big shifts in business over that time. And by the time we moved to Brevard in 2014, I was no longer in love with my work. I was in the middle of dealing with a raging autoimmune disease that left me almost unable to function, much less get excited about sales, marketing, networking, and all the hustling I was used to doing for business.

So over the course of the 13-day French Broad River trip in 2016…when we concocted our crazy scheme to sell everything and hit the road in 2017… I was 100% on board. Eager to ditch it all.

Leaving it all behind wasn’t. I felt like a failure a lot of the time. I worried about what I was supposed to do with my curious mind and even curious-er gifts of helping people get clarity about where they were stuck. I kept working with a few treasured clients. They helped ME in ways I can’t even express.

Now, I’m back in North Carolina again, settled in for awhile to care for an elderly relative who needs us. But we’ll go back on the road full-time again one day. It might be soon, it might be years from now. In the meantime, we’ll be weekend and shorter-extended trip warriors, floating rivers, backpacking through the mountains, and seeing as much of the outdoors as we can.

AND…at heart, I’m a Wayfinder. I’ve spent my life finding my way towards what makes me happy. Towards what lights me up. Towards the things that give me LIFE.

And I’m putting together something so exhilarating, so thought-provoking, and very much made for people who also want to find their way towards what lights them up, towards what makes them happy, and definitely towards what gives them LIFE. And it is something we can do TOGETHER.

“Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming “Wow! What a Ride!”

Hunter S. Thompson

I am a tiny bit obsessed with people and their “becoming” (or their unbecoming, which I really, really LOVE).

I’m re-reading Oprah’s interview with Michelle Obama from the December 2018 issue O Magazine. They are discussing Michelle Obama’s fabulous new memoir “Becoming.”

So many points in her story have her questioning what the hell is going on. What the hell is she doing. And she figures it out…

“I spent my of my childhood listening to the sound of striving.”

“I take you on a journey of who that little striving star-getter became, which is what a lot of hard-driving kids become: a box checker…I wasn’t a swerver. I wasn’t somebody that was going to take risks. I narrowed myself to being this thing I thought I should be. It took loss – losses in my life that made me think, ‘Have you ever stopped to think about who you wanted to be?’

Oprah responds, “What I loved about this is, it says to every person reading the book: You have a right to change your mind.”

And she talks about her law degree and work at a law firm and confesses to her mom, “I can’t do this for the rest of my life.” Her mom disagrees.

And she talks about Barack as being the opposite of a box checker and how he was swerving all over the place.

And she freely talks about marriage counseling and how it wasn’t what she expected. “It was about me exploring my sense of happiness. What clicked in me was that I need support and I need some from him [Barack]. But I needed to figure out how to build my life in a way that works for me.”

Gaaaaaaaaaaaahhhh. There’s so much more here I could dissect. It’s marvelous to read her truths.

And it is such a lesson in inquiry about life. Are you happy? Peaceful? Satisfied? Fulfilled? If not, what needs to change? Often, people think fulfillment will come from fame or money or something outside themselves.

Really, though, contentment comes from three sentences from Oprah in this article: “What was so valuable to me – and I think will be for everyone else who reads the book – is that nothing really changed [with Michelle and Barack because of marriage counseling]. You just changed your perception of what was happening. And that made you happier.”

I could die happy right now for having read this lesson. So simple. Not necessarily easy. But life – and achieving happiness – can really be that simple.