life update - back to the countryside

The last few weeks have been intense! Lately I’ve been immersed in studying several different topics that resonate with me - channelling Light Language, Gene Keys, breathwork, and ancestral nutrition. This is solo work, very grounding and also spiritual.

Our pace of life has significantly changed - as we made the incredibly hard decision to move from the edge of Austin, Texas, back to our family home in the country a few months ago.

It’s actually quiet at night again, and we can see so many stars + hear so many wild birds every morning. We have tomatoes, peppers, asparagus and herbs growing - and a little flock of chickens already, who will gift us amazing eggs come Fall.

No more 5G headaches, traffic and train noise, or dealing with a rental house that wasn’t properly ours. No more “parking lot birds” at the backyard feeder!

movin’ to the country … gotta repair the old chicken coop

The land spirits are awakening again, so glad we’ve returned..

There are huge perks, and also some major tradeoffs. Let’s not talk about gas prices, for example..

If you’ve been following me for awhile, you know we made the “crazy” decision to move to the edge of Austin right as the pandemic hit.

That decision turned out to be spectacular beyond all reckoning … AND, it also fast-tracked some major growth and clarity about what we actually value, and who our tribe really includes.

How’d we end up in the country again? Well, I grew up in small-town Texas and idolized Austin since I was a teen. Somehow, it always felt so out of reach to live there … and then in 2011 (right around my Saturn return), my mother passed on - and we moved to the countryside to help my aging father.

Before we knew it, 9 years had passed - and I felt agitated, trapped, suffocating, like I would die if we didn’t get the hell away from rural Texas and all the bad, sad things I’d come to associate with it.

Human Design teaches that for Projectors like me, environment is so important. We can’t thrive in a place that makes us feel small, invisible, or like we aren’t welcome. This applies to relationships, social groups, climate, and even home decor!

Living in Round Rock was a brilliant experience, deeply healing for me in so many ways. It quelled some huge aches in my psyche, and broke some trauma-bonds, too.

It gave me the mental relief and expansive space to finally finish a project I started back in 2011 - writing and publishing my Conscious Pregnancy Guidebook!

What an incredible labor of love…

sneak a peek, read the reviews, and grab your copy!

My book is now available at all major book sellers around the world - and you can get your own physical + digital copy on my website, here.

However - I was surprised to learn that I actually don’t fit into Austin culture all that well.

Turns out I’m more Texan than Austinite.

The pandemic was such a gift, really - because it shone a blinding light of clarity on all the connections, priorities, and people I thought I knew. Many of my friends were “into holistic health”, and I thought I knew what that meant - but the past two years really separated the wheat from the chaff.

As herbalists and homebirth midwives I admired virtue-signalled about shots and masks on Instagram - I learned that a lot of the holistic wellness folks I knew simply did not view health the same way I did. When enough fear and shame was applied, they dropped their ideals and fell into line with mainstream thinking.

Even folks who were natural wellness influencers scurried back to industrialized medicine, and vehemently denounced anyone who didn’t do the same.

I couldn’t understand where they were coming from. I thought they had faith in the body’s innate healing wisdom and the power of our immune system? Why should that not apply even in unprecedented times?

Then it occurred to me - I have a spiritual relationship with my physical body.

I believe that true holistic health is a spiritual practice as much as scientific, and that means I have a LOT more in common with religious folks than I ever realized before…!

I can’t explain what a huge revelation this is - but it shifted the bedrock of how I relate to others.

I used to actively seek out secular, non-religious connections … but it seems that so many of them are caught in an onslaught of information designed to create unquestioning compliance, and they lack the rudder of discernment.

Now, I need to be around people who are willing and able to question everything, and who understand that everything is interconnected, conscious, and sacred - even the dark and scary bits of the world.

As I open more to my own spirituality, I find I have less in common with those who don’t see the world and everything in it as alive, conscious, and sentient.

Austin (and maybe most big cities) seem to be full of highly educated (indoctrinated?) people who have intellectualized away any concept of the Divine as quaint and backwards.

They champion causes to ‘prove’ their empathy, and unwittingly worship at the altar of woke, secular scientism, which wants to convince us that human bodies are mere meat-hunks ripe for manipulation (transhumanism), and that it’s somehow progressive to erase women, mothers, and bodily autonomy.

A big reason for moving to the city was to give my kids the social opportunities of a thriving homeschool culture - but then everything shut down, and kind of stayed that way.

All the cool groups and co-ops that I thought we’d be able to join were shut down - and the irony was, now everyone was living in social isolation, just when we thought we were finally going to escape it!

Incidentally, it seemed that all my favorite local businesses in Austin turned out to be the ones who were most rigid about pandemic measures, even insisting on their own industrial-strength hand sanitizer at the door.

So I quit going to those places, and realized that between that, and the surprise-reveal of holistic friends being not-so-holistic after all … a lot of Austin’s appeal had disappeared.

When I dislocated my knee in late 2020, it kept me from working in person for several months - which forced me to focus on what the pandemic (or more accurately, our government’s response to the pandemic) was really doing to the world.

Since then, I’ve been reflecting a lot more on what my children actually need.

They are getting older, and things are so much different when you no longer have little children. My “baby” is 10 - and my next youngest is well on his way to the teen years.

More deep conversations, more tech, more aloofness, more freedom…

I have more to share with you, like our explorations with curriculum, our gardening and homesteading plans, and how my daughter is learning to drive (!) … but this missive is already quite long.

Wishing you a blessed and beloved Mother’s Day - even if the day is complex and/or brings up heavy emotions for you.

My mama was overflowing with love. This is a pic of her, me, and my firstborn, in the year 2000, when we had no idea what idyllic times we were living in, then. :)