Choosing What’s Actually Mine

Choosing What's Actually Mine

There is something I have been learning this year that I did not expect to be learning at this stage of my life.

How to choose things that I actually want.

It sounds simple. It is not simple. It has taken me the better part of five decades to understand that I did not know how to do this — and longer still to understand why.

I grew up walking on eggshells.

But I want to be careful here, because that phrase can flatten something that was actually more complicated and more disorienting than a simple description of difficulty. It was not a battlefield every day. There were beautiful moments in my childhood. Mundane ones. Good ones. Real ones. There were moments of laughter and the specific sweetness that can exist even inside a hard life.

What made it hard was not constant darkness. It was inconsistency.

Not knowing which version of things you were going to get. Learning to read the room before you entered it. Staying alert, staying careful, making yourself small — not because every moment required it, but because you never quite knew which moments would. That particular kind of vigilance has its own cost. It settles into the nervous system and stays there long after the circumstances that created it are gone.

I was a highly sensitive child in an environment that did not have much room for sensitivity. So I learned to hide. I hid most of myself, actually, for a very long time.

I want to say something here about the adults who shaped those years, because I think it matters and because I have spent a lot of time sitting with it.

They were navigating their own storms.

They were carrying habits and patterns and wounds from their own childhoods — perpetuating a cycle they did not know they were in. The legacy lived in their systems first, and then it moved into mine. That is not an excuse for the harm that was done. The harm was real and it had real consequences that have followed me through decades of choices, relationships, and the inside of my own body. But it is a truth I hold alongside the grief — with compassion, because I know now that broken people break things, and that most of them do not know they are doing it.

The work I am doing now — the healing, the transmuting, the trying to meet myself with something gentler than I was ever shown — is the work of breaking that cycle. Of not passing it forward in the same form. Of turning something that was inherited into something that can actually heal.

That feels like one of the most important things I have ever done. Some days it feels like the whole point.

What I did not realize for a very long time is that growing up the way I did left me without something essential.

The ability to trust my own instincts about what was right for me.

When safety is conditional and unpredictable in childhood, you learn to accept what is given rather than ask whether it is right for you. You do not develop the internal voice that says this one is mine or this one is not. Or you develop it, and then you learn very quickly not to listen to it, because listening to it was never safe. You take what is presented. You try to make it work. You hope that this time it will.

I have said yes to things in my life — jobs, relationships, situations — where in the very first moment, something in me already knew.

Not this one.

A quiet signal, clear as anything, that this was not the right fit. And I would override it. Every time. I would give it a chance, try it on, hope I was wrong about the feeling. Sometimes things lasted a year. Sometimes eighteen months. But they would end, and when they ended I would feel the particular hollow feeling of someone who had always known, somewhere underneath, that they were never quite in the right place to begin with.

For a long time I thought this meant something was wrong with me. That I was the common denominator. And in a way I was — but not in the way I thought.

The problem was not that I was broken. The problem was that I had never been taught to trust myself. When the message of your childhood is that you do not have much say over what happens to you, you internalize that. It becomes the water you swim in. I carried that mindset for decades without fully knowing I had it.

I also want to name the losses. Because they were real.

The loss of a childhood where I felt fully safe. The loss of learning early to trust my own instincts. The loss of knowing how to identify and express what I was feeling — because when you grow up powerless, you never develop that language. You absorb. You endure. You move on. At thirty years old, in the middle of a car ride with coworkers who were trying to help me, I realized I did not know how to feel anger. Had never let myself feel it. It had been held inside me my entire life.

That was the moment I understood how much had been quietly accumulating — in my body, in my choices, in the life I had been building on a foundation I couldn't fully see.

But here is what I also want to tell you.

I never stopped hoping.

There have been moments of real despair in my life. Moments of wanting to give up. Moments of wishing, with everything I had, that I had been given a different foundation to build from. Those moments were real and I do not minimize them.

But underneath all of it, even in the hardest years, there was always a thread I held onto. The belief — sometimes thin, sometimes barely there — that healing was possible. That a different life was reachable. That I was not permanently defined by what happened to me.

One of my favorite teachers at SWIHA — the Southwest Institute of Healing Arts — introduced a concept that has stayed with me ever since. She said that healing is like peeling an onion. Layer by layer. You do not heal all at once. You return to the same core material again and again with more capacity each time, releasing a little more with each pass.

Some days that image gives me tremendous hope. There is always another layer that can be reached, healed, released. Progress is real even when it is slow.

Other days, I will be honest, it exhausts me. I wonder if it will ever end. Whether I will ever reach the core and have some reprieve.

Both of those things are true at the same time. I have learned to hold them both.

And slowly — not in a straight line, not without setbacks — life has gotten better.

Little by little I have healed aspects of myself, achieved goals I set, built a life that looks more and more like the one I wrote down on a piece of paper when I was sixteen years old and crying alone in my room with Pink Floyd on repeat. Everything on that paper, I became. I know now that I have always been able to find my way toward what I truly want when I let myself want it clearly enough.

The challenge has been learning to want the right things in the first place. To feel the difference between a choice that is actually mine and a choice I am making out of fear, or longing, or the old conditioning that says take what is offered and be grateful.

Here is what is different about this chapter.

When Kelly and I decided to sell everything and move to Europe, it was not a whim. It was not a hope. It was not me trying something on and seeing if it fit.

It fit before we fully decided. I knew it the way I have rarely known anything — not with anxiety underneath the excitement, but with a deep and quiet certainty that this was the direction my life had always been pointing. That this was mine.

Kelly is mine. Fifteen years of choosing each other every single day — that is not a mistake, not a placeholder, not something I talked myself into. From the very beginning, underneath everything, I knew.

This move is an extension of that knowing. The blog is an extension of it. Field & Frequency — the work I am building around nervous system healing, around helping other women find their way back to themselves — is the most direct expression of it I have ever attempted.

Because what I understand now, that I did not understand at sixteen or twenty-five or thirty-five, is this:

The inner knowing was never wrong.

Every time I overrode it, I paid a price. Every time I honored it — really honored it, let it lead — I ended up somewhere true.

I also know that my story is not only mine.

The cycle of childhood wounding passed unconsciously from generation to generation is one of the most universal human experiences on this earth. Parents wound children not because they are monsters but because they were wounded children themselves. The healing work — the peeling of the onion, the learning to trust the quiet inner signal, the choosing of what is actually yours — is work that so many of us are quietly doing, each in our own way, trying to transmute something inherited into something that can finally heal.

That is what this move is about, at its deepest level. Not just a change of geography. A change of the whole architecture. A life built, finally, on what is actually mine. Could I do this work while staying in the US? Of course I can. Perhaps I will. If I know anything by now is that things can change, they can suddenly change, we course correct and carry on. But the architecture, the framework of how I move through this world is changing.

Every action we are taking now is pointing us in the direction of a new life, in a country and continent new to us. I do not know exactly how we are going to land. The uncertainty is real and I am not going to pretend otherwise. We are building the plane while flying it, and everyday the ground is further down than it used to feel.

But I know this is right. Through moments when I second guess out of fear. I knew it before I could fully explain it. And this time — for the first time in a very long time — I am not overriding that.

74 days.

20 Days

I have given notice at the only job I have ever held for more than two years at a stretch.

That sentence is more complicated than it looks. Let me try to explain.

I am not a corporate person. I have never been a corporate person. I grew up on a farm in rural Minnesota, worked at a spiritual bookshop for eleven years, guided at-risk teenagers through wilderness programs, grew cannabis on ten acres in southern Oregon, and spent most of my adult life quietly certain that the world of performance reviews and quarterly business reviews and Slack channels and three-screen desk setups was a world that belonged to other people. People who were wired differently than me. People who had gone to traditional colleges and learned how offices worked and didn't flinch when someone said words like high-performing culture and running leaner.

But there was always a question underneath that certainty. A quiet one, the kind you don't say out loud because saying it out loud makes it real and then you have to do something about it.

Could I hang?

Could I — the farm girl, the bookshop girl, the girl who never finished a traditional degree, the one who moved every time things got hard, — could I actually show up to something corporate, perform at a high level, and stay?

My work history, I'll admit, looked a lot like my relationship history before Kelly. The Curiosity Shoppe was eleven years, but not consecutively at one company. The wilderness program was five years, but across organizations. Everything else: a year, maybe eighteen months, and then a clean break and a fresh start somewhere new. I was good at beginnings. I was less sure about middles.

Four years ago I was hired at a nationwide vacation rental property management company in a sales role. I did not know then that this job was going to answer the question I had been carrying my whole life.

I want to be honest about what this company gave me, because I think it deserves that honesty even as I count down the days to leaving it.

The pay was the most I have ever earned. Consistently, over time — not a windfall, not a lucky quarter, but a sustained income that crossed a threshold I had spent years visualizing. Literally visualizing — I had worked through John Assaraf's program specifically focused on earning more, sitting with the number, seeing myself there, believing it was possible for someone like me. The most I had ever made before was half what I made there.

There are no coincidences. I was hired right after I finished that program. I am certain of this in the way I am certain of very few things.

The benefits were great. The PTO was great. And — this is the one that I want to linger on, because it mattered more than any of the numbers — I got to work from home.

Every morning I woke up and walked the dogs before the heat set in. Fed them breakfast. Moved their beds into my office. Showered. Sat down at my desk. And the dogs came to work with me. They came outside with me on breaks. They waited by the office door at the end of the day, and when I logged off we had a whole routine — a little dance, a song I made up and sang every single afternoon as we walked out together.

We did it, we're done with work, we did it, yahooie.

I did not have to commute. I did not have to do complicated things to my hair. On the hard days — the flare days, the days when the fatigue was sitting behind my eyes and my wrists were stiff and I needed ten extra minutes and a second application of arnica cream — I could do that. I could manage it. I was home. The dogs were with me. The grace of that is not something I take lightly, especially now that I understand what was quietly developing in my body during all of those years.

And the work itself — I want to say this because I think it is important and I did not always believe it was going to be true. The work itself taught me things I genuinely needed to learn. I learned data. I learned professional relationship building. I learned how to create templates and run monthly calls and facilitate quarterly business reviews and build PowerPoint presentations and manage a book of business that eventually grew to over two hundred listings. I learned things that I, the girl who always thought she wasn't built for this world, had no idea she was capable of learning.

I proved something to myself here. I need to name that plainly before I say anything else.

I stayed. I performed — 106% of goal for my entire time in that sales role. A high-pressure sales role that required me to have the same conversations about the same product every single day with owners who may or may not have been ready to hear it. I wanted desperately out of that role. I wanted the Account Manager position, building real relationships with real owners over time, and I went after it with everything I had.

I got it. And I loved it. And I was good at it.

But the company was changing.

They called it a new iteration, 3.0 — a new vision, a leaner and meaner operational machine. There were over a thousand employees when I started. There are closer to six hundred now. Two major layoffs. And also quiet reductions on random Fridays where you would discover by lunchtime that half the photography team was simply gone — you'd find out because someone's Slack handle had been deactivated. The entire organization restructured. And then restructured again.

I survived both layoffs. I am grateful for that in the way you are grateful for surviving something — which is to say, with some relief and some guilt and a persistent low hum of when is the next one that never entirely went away. It felt like the pandemic layoffs all over again. That particular kind of institutional PTSD that sets in when you understand that your continued employment is never quite as secure as it looks.

Then last August came.

A colleague went on emergency leave and I stepped in without hesitation — I was glad to help, genuinely. What I did not anticipate was what a month of carrying two full books of business in peak summer season would actually cost me. I worked overtime every day. I worked some weekends. I was always behind, always one request away from falling further back. When my colleague returned it took another full month before I was current on just my own accounts.

And then I was burned out. Really burned out. The kind that doesn't lift after a long weekend or even a good vacation. The kind that settles into the bones and sits there.

The RA came full blast through all of this. My body was keeping score, the way bodies do, and the score was not in my favor.

I gave what I could after that. But I'll be honest: I had given up a little. Piece by piece, quietly, in the way that people give up when they feel unsupported and overextended and are counting down to something they cannot yet say out loud.

I have twenty days left.

So far, some of them feel like pure liberation. I am walking away from the pressure. From the constant pull on my time and attention. From the particular exhaustion of performing at a high level inside a system that kept raising the ceiling and never quite acknowledged the cost.

Some of them feel like fear.

I have looked at the remote-work-from-anywhere job sites. The ones designed for people who want to work online from anywhere in the world. I have read through the listings, and I want to tell you what I feel when I read them.

I feel heavy.

So many of them sound exactly like where I've been. High-performing culture. Fast-paced environment. Results-driven team. And something in me — the part that just spent four years proving she could do it — closes like a fist around the word no.

I do not want to go back. I do not want to sit at a desk for eight to ten hours staring at three screens ever again. I do not want the pressure to perform, the quarterly reviews, the book of business, the endless requests, the Monday morning Slack check that tells me who is gone now.

I want freedom. I want autonomy. I want to go outside.

What I am walking toward instead — the blog, Field & Frequency, Kelly's bookkeeping, the online store — none of it is earning yet. That is the honest truth and I am not going to hide it. The uncertainty is real. The fear is real. We are building the plane while flying it, and the ground is further down than it used to feel.

But here is what I know.

I proved the thing I needed to prove. I showed up to the corporate world — the one I was certain was built for other people — and I stayed, and I performed, and I learned things I did not believe I was capable of learning, and I earned more than I had ever earned, and I grew up in ways I did not expect to grow up. I did not always handle every difficult moment with grace. But I got better. Steadily, imperfectly, for four years, I got better.

July 6th would have been my four-year anniversary.

I will be gone by then.

Not because I failed. Not because something ended the way things always used to end. But because I finished what I came to do, and because something more important is waiting, and because I finally — finally — know the difference between running away from something and walking toward it.

We did it. We're done with work.

20 days.

The Volvo is Gone

The buyers came on a Saturday.

The 2021 XC90 T8. White. Plug-in hybrid. The first truly beautiful, truly nice car we had ever owned together — a car that felt like an achievement, like evidence of something we had built. Kelly loved it in the specific way that a person who has spent years doing unglamorous work loves the beautiful thing he worked his way toward. Not with attachment exactly. With appreciation. With the quiet pride of someone who knows what it cost and is grateful for it every single time he gets behind the wheel.

He knew, when we listed it, that it was the right thing to do. We both knew. The car was never coming to Europe. That math was never going to work. Every dollar from the sale is runway in England, or a tank of gas driving south through France, or a week of groceries in a country where we are starting from zero. We accepted this. We made peace with it.

But making peace with something and watching it drive away are two different things.

The buyers were nice people. That helped and also somehow made it harder. They shook our hands. They admired it in the way that people admire something they are about to own, with a kind of forward-leaning enthusiasm that has no room in it for what is being left behind. That was okay. We were happy for them and happy and sad for us at the same time, and all of those things were allowed to be true.

And then they drove it away.

Kelly stood in the driveway for a moment after. Just a moment. He is not a man who lingers in his feelings in public, not even with me standing right there. But I saw it — the particular stillness of someone watching something go that they are not going to get back, letting themselves feel exactly what that costs, and then squaring their shoulders and coming back into the present tense.

There have been a few moments in this process that hit like a ton of bricks. This was one of them. One of the largest tangible steps we have taken toward actually leaving — scary and exhilarating and all too real, all at once.

This is what we signed up for. The whole project of this move has been a long and deliberate process of releasing — things, comforts, certainties, the beautiful accumulated evidence of a life we built here. The furniture. The tools. The things. The car. We have been practicing letting go for two years, and we have gotten good at it, and it still lands every time.

Here is what I want to hold onto, even when the letting go is hard.

The car was never the point. The car was a milestone on a road we were always going to keep walking. And the road goes somewhere now — somewhere real, somewhere with a date attached, somewhere with a Vicuna Air confirmation number and two dogs and a plan held together with research and faith and fifteen years of choosing each other every single day.

There is still uncertainty about how exactly we are going to land and how we are going to live. We are building the plane while flying it, as they say. But we have each other, which has always been the only thing we have ever really needed to figure out what comes next.

The Volvo is gone.

There is no going back now.

There was never going to be.

74 days.

Dealing with Uncertainty

We Sold Everything | May 11, 2026

I am writing this from the couch, recovering.

This weekend I had the most painful and difficult RA flare I have experienced since the one that sent me to urgent care almost two years ago — the one where a PA took one look at me and said everything you are describing is classic rheumatoid arthritis and my entire life rearranged itself around those words. That flare brought the diagnosis. This one brought something else. Something I am still sitting with.

But I want to start with the physical, because I think most people do not understand what a flare actually costs a person. I want to be honest about it because honesty is the only reason to write any of this down.

What a Flare Actually Feels Like

I could feel it coming. You learn to read the signals — the particular quality of stiffness in the morning, the way the fatigue sits differently when inflammation and pain is gathering. Kelly urged me to take the Prednisone. I resisted, the way I always resist adding more medication to the stack — I know it is not good for me in the long run, I have very little prescribed, and I am careful about when I use it.

I waited too long.

By the time it took effect, I was laid out. The timing made it worse — it was a shot weekend, the Humira generic I inject once every two weeks, which already leaves me more vulnerable. The hydroxychloroquine I have been taking seems to be losing effectiveness over the past month. My specialist — I had seen him just Friday, May 8th — had prescribed a new sulfa medication to address this. I had just started it. Not in time.

The pain was everywhere. Fingers, hands, wrists, shoulders, knees. Getting up and down from any surface was an exercise in managing the distance between where I was and where I needed to be without using my hands. Hands that were so stiff and swollen they felt like they belonged to someone else. And underneath all of it — the fatigue. Not tiredness. Not sleepiness. Something I have come to call existential fatigue because that is the only description that comes close. It pervades my very soul. I feel it deep in my eyes, in every system, a heaviness that is not about sleep and cannot be fixed by it.

Today is Monday. I called in sick for the latter half of the day. The fatigue still there, the pain minor, but still there, my brain not quite right — words are slipping away from me, patience is paper thin, the cognitive fog that comes with a serious flare is its own particular indignity on top of everything else.

This one scared me. This one rocked me in a way the smaller flares this year have not.

And I know exactly why it happened.

The Car

We are pretty sure we sold the Volvo.

The 2021 XC90 T8 plug-in hybrid. White. The first truly beautiful, truly nice car we have ever owned — a car that felt like an achievement, a milestone, evidence of something we had built together. Kelly loves this car. Loves it in the way that a person who has spent years doing unglamorous work loves the beautiful thing he worked his way toward. It was not in the cards financially to bring it to Europe. We knew this. We accepted it. And we listed it.

If the sale goes through this Saturday, the last significant thing that had to go in order for this move to happen will be gone.

I want you to understand what that means.

We gave our notice. Last day of work: June 12th. That was already a commitment with weight to it. But the car — the car was the last big question. Will it sell? Will it sell in time? Will it sell for enough? We were not certain. We are not certain of very much right now. But we are looking at the answer being yes, and that yes changes everything.

There is no going back now.

I felt that land in my body this weekend alongside the flare, and I believe — I genuinely believe — that the two things are not unrelated.

The 3am Fear

We have been dealing with imposter syndrome.

I want to say that plainly because I think it needs to be said plainly. We are not sailing through this on a wave of confidence and excitement, though there is plenty of both. There are also moments — usually in the middle of the night, the particular darkness of 3am — when one of us jolts awake with a fear gripping us that is hard to name in daylight but very real in the dark.

Is this the right thing to do?Can we actually do this?Who are we to live our dreams this big?

We have confessed these moments to each other. Quietly, carefully, checking in the way people check in when they are trying to hold something together by mutual agreement. You had that fear last night? So did I. We are still in it. We are still going.

But I notice, underneath the practical fears about money and logistics and timing, a deeper question that has been running in me my whole life and is simply louder now because the stakes are higher.

Do I deserve this? Do I have the capacity to hold a dream this large? Can I allow this to unfold — really allow it — without something in me finding a way to make sure it doesn't?

These are not new questions. I have been asking versions of them since I was a girl enduring life, wondering what was wrong with her. They are just wearing new clothes right now.

What Gabor Maté Has to Do With Any of This

I have been reading Dr. Gabor Maté's work — particularly When the Body Says No — with the particular hunger of someone who recognizes themselves on every page.

He identifies four traits that appear consistently in people, predominantly women, who develop autoimmune conditions. I want to share them here because when I read them I felt simultaneously seen and undone.

One: Prioritizing others' needs. Compulsive caregiving. Putting everyone else's emotional needs ahead of your own so consistently and so automatically that you stop noticing you are doing it.

Two: Rigid identification with duty. A compulsive focus on roles, responsibility, and obligation over personal needs. Showing up for everyone and everything because that is what you do, regardless of what it costs.

Three: Repression of anger. The inability to express healthy anger or say no. Appearing endlessly accommodating, endlessly nice, endlessly available — while the anger that has nowhere to go turns inward.

Four: Responsibility for others' feelings. The bone-deep belief that you are responsible for how other people feel and must never disappoint anyone. Ever. Under any circumstances.

I have all four. I have had all four my entire life. I did not know that is what I had — I just thought it was who I was.

The Mathematics of an Empty Cup

When I first encountered the concept of the highly sensitive person I felt something I can only describe as a quiet explosion. An aha that kept expanding the longer I sat with it.

I have always been easily overwhelmed. By noise, by conflict, by the swirling complexity of ordinary life that other people seemed to navigate without effort. By too many demands arriving at once. By the weight of other people's expectations, even loving ones, even ones I genuinely wanted to meet. I spent most of my life believing this meant something was wrong with me. That I was broken in some specific, unfixable way that I could not name but could always feel.

What I understand now is that I am simply wired to feel more. To take in more. To process more deeply. In the right conditions — quiet, slow, spacious, safe — this is a profound gift. In conditions of chronic stress and overwhelm and hypervigilance, it is an accelerant on an already burning fire.

And here is the thing about a nervous system running perpetually on empty: there is a mathematics to it that is not about character or discipline or how much you love the people in your life.

You cannot give what you do not have.

I have let people down throughout my life. I know this. I have carried the guilt and shame of it for years — the birthdays I did not remember, the calls I did not make, the cards that were never sent. Even after smartphones made forgetting inexcusable I still struggled. Not because those people did not matter to me. They did. They do. But because the bandwidth required to track and tend to others was already fully consumed by the work of keeping myself upright.

I could show up — fully, steadfastly, with everything I had — for stretches of time. And then there would be a crack. A withdrawal. A disappearing. Not from lack of love but from lack of resource. I was living on just enough. Allowing just enough good in, managing just enough connection, sustaining just enough of myself to keep going. The overwhelm was always just behind my line of sight, imminent if not already present, and I unconsciously kept my life small enough to stay just ahead of it.

There were opportunities I declined not because I did not want them but because some part of me could not believe I was worthy of them. Could not hold that much good. Could not trust that the floor would hold if I let myself have something that large. I had a ceiling — invisible, self-constructed, maintained by the same beliefs that made the four traits possible — and I kept bumping against it and calling the bumping discipline problems, or laziness, or fear, when what it actually was, was a nervous system that had never been given enough safety to expand.

I have been getting better. Kelly is a large part of why. Fifteen years of consistent, quiet, unwavering love has done something to my nervous system that decades of self-work alone could not quite accomplish. We heal in relationship. Bessel van der Kolk says this and I believe it completely because I have lived it.

But I am not fully healed. The overwhelm is still there, still just behind the line of sight. The capacity to hold all of the things simultaneously — the healthy eating, the meditation, the relationships, the exercise, the work, the creative life, all of it at once, all of it sustained — is still something I am working toward rather than something I have arrived at.

I used to call this a discipline problem. I no longer believe that is what it is.

This is about healing. About learning, for the first time in my life, how to fill my own cup from an aware and healthy place — not from survival, not from performance, not from the hypervigilant girl's exhausting calculus of managing threats and meeting expectations. From genuine nourishment. From real rest. From the slow accumulation of safety that allows a nervous system to finally, finally stand down.

I do not know yet exactly how to do that. Not completely. But I am more committed to finding out than I have ever been committed to anything. And I believe — I have to believe — that the life we are building in Europe, slower and warmer and quieter and more human than the one we are leaving, is part of how it happens.

Not a cure. A condition. The right soil, finally, for the right kind of growing. In taking care of myself. Instead of what Brene Brown calls “armoring up”.

Where It Came From

When you grow up never knowing what mood your mother will be in — when you learn to live your days by walking on eggshells, reading every room you enter for threats and danger and the emotional weather of whoever is in it — your nervous system learns something. It learns to stay alert. It learns to never fully relax. It learns that safety is conditional and can be withdrawn at any moment, so you had better keep watching.

This is called hypervigilance. I did not have a name for it until recently. I just thought I was a careful person. A sensitive person. An observant person. All of those things are true. But underneath them was a nervous system that had never been given permission to stand down.

I am a highly sensitive person — my acupuncturist named it after a few sessions, gently, the way a good healer names the thing you have always known but never been able to say. Highly sensitive people feel everything more intensely — the beauty and the pain both, the energy in rooms, the emotional states of people around them. In the right environment it is a gift. In a chaotic or unsafe environment it is an accelerant.

I masked. I performed. I learned to present a version of myself to the outside world that could fit in, pass as fine, manage the expectations of whatever context I was in. And underneath the performance I always had the low hum of waiting to be caught — not at anything specific, just caught, found out, exposed as someone who did not quite belong in the place she was standing.

I walked away from the family legacy that created all of this. The generational poverty, the addiction, the abuse, the perpetual grief and low self-esteem that comes from these experiences — I left that behind. What I did not fully understand until recently is that leaving the source does not mean leaving the patterns. I took the hypervigilance with me. I took the compulsive caregiving and the repressed anger and the belief that asking for help was failure and the responsibility for everyone else's feelings. I took all of it, packed neatly into my nervous system, and carried it into every room I walked into for the rest of my life.

And my body, eventually, said no.

The Cost of Independence

I have always taken fierce pride in being independent. In taking care of myself. In not needing help.

I am no longer proud of this.

What I understand now is that the independence was not strength — or not only strength. It was armor. It was the hypervigilant girl's solution to a world that had taught her that needing things was dangerous, that depending on people was a setup for disappointment, that the only safe position was the one where you needed nothing from anyone.

The armor worked. I survived. I have been learning, slowly and imperfectly and with great dedication, to thrive. But thriving requires softness. It requires the willingness to be seen needing something. It requires emotional safety — not the performed safety of someone who has learned to look fine, but the real thing, the kind that lets you set down the armor because you genuinely believe it is safe to do so.

I am learning to be soft. I am learning what it feels like to be grounded and slow and present. I am learning that I do not thrive in high-performance environments that reward grinding — that the hustle culture that has shaped so much of American working life is genuinely antithetical to my nervous system's needs, and that choosing peace over performance is not failure. It is, finally, listening.

The Meditation I Forgot

I had a lapse in my meditation practice this winter. Weeks went by. I felt the difference — in my regulation, in my patience, in my ability to hold difficulty without being swallowed by it — and I kept meaning to return and didn't.

Last night, after the flare had exhausted itself and I was finally still, I put on a guided meditation I love and lay in the dark and let it do what meditation does. Afterward I felt the thing I always feel after — like something that had been clenched very tightly had been gently reminded that it was allowed to open.

I know what I need. This is perhaps the most clarifying gift of this season, difficult as it has been. I know what I need, and I know what I need to stop doing, and I am making choices accordingly.

Drink water. Eat well. Sleep. Move gently. Meditate. Stay grounded. Visualize — not the mechanics of the move, but myself actually living the life. Myself having the capacity to hold this dream. Myself deserving it.

Because I do. We do.

What This Move Is Really About

I am moving to a country — to a continent — that does not worship at the altar of hustle. That values the long lunch and the afternoon rest and the idea that a life should have room in it for living. That does not consider it weakness to work fewer hours or measure a person's worth by their productivity metrics.

Perhaps, just perhaps, I can carve out a place for myself there that nurtures my soul rather than depletes it. A pace that my nervous system can actually sustain. A life that does not require constant performance just to get through the day.

That is what Spain is. That is what France is. That is what all of this is.

Not just an adventure. Not just a dream finally lived. A genuine, medically necessary, soul-level recalibration toward the life my body has been asking for since it started speaking in the only language I was finally forced to hear.

The Volvo is selling. The notice has been given. The flare has passed, mostly, and I am still here.

I am bolstered by one thought as I close the laptop and rest.

I do not have to earn this. I just have to allow it.

More soon — including a deeper dive into the overwhelm that contributed to this diagnosis, and what I am learning about healing the roots rather than just managing the symptoms.

We Are Actually Going — Here Is the Whole Winding Truth of How We Got Here

We Sold Everything | May 3rd 2026

I have been wanting to write this post for months.

Not because I knew what it would say — I didn't, for a long time. The plan kept changing. The destination kept shifting. The numbers kept not quite working. And every time I thought I knew what I was going to tell you, something moved and I had to wait a little longer to find out what was actually true.

Now I know. So here it is — the whole winding, frustrating, occasionally absurd, ultimately clarifying story of how two people in their mid-fifties went from we should move to Spain to we are getting on a plane to England on August 6th with two dogs and a laptop and a plan held together with equal parts research and faith.

Buckle up. It took a while to get here.

The Original Plan

Spain. That was always the dream. Lainie's first choice — warm climate, Mediterranean pace. Kelly's preference leaned toward France, but Spain was where the conversation always landed. We had traveled in Europe together. We knew how it felt to be there. We knew it was where we were going.

What we did not know, at first, was exactly how.

The Digital Nomad Visa seemed like the answer — Spain has one, it's designed for remote workers, it sounded like exactly what we needed. Then we looked at the income requirements. Roughly $3,050 a month. We were not there yet. We were building toward it — Kelly's bookkeeping certification, this blog, Field & Frequency, the Etsy store — but we were not there yet.

So we kept planning and kept building and kept looking for another way in.

The Mexico Chapter

Someone  suggested Mexico. Lake Chapala specifically — one of the largest expat communities in the world, mild climate, affordable cost of living, and critically, we could drive there. No cargo holds, no $20,000 flight bill, just us and Mollie and Samson in the car crossing the border at a pace that worked for everyone.

We got excited. We researched. And then we looked at the income thresholds for Mexican residency.

Temporary resident: approximately $3,800 to $4,500 a month in income. Savings of $65,000 to $75,000.

We had $45,000 all in. We had no established monthly income. Yet.

Mexico was not going to work.

The Visa Research Spiral

After Mexico fell through I went deep into research mode — the mode I go into when a door closes and I need to find the window. Portugal D7 visa. Spain student visa. France long-stay visa. Greece digital nomad visa. Each one had thresholds. Each one had requirements. Each one was designed, it seemed, for people who already had the income we were trying to build.

We consulted Roots Global. They were helpful and honest. The plan was sound, they said. The income just needed to catch up.

I applied to several European-based remote work companies. I have not been hired yet. Companies want you in the country already, so we need to get there so I have better chances of being hired.

Kelly gave notice at his job — not because we had everything figured out, but because his work kept scheduling trainings that required travel and he felt bad knowing they were spending money on him when we already knew we were leaving. That is exactly the kind of person he is. He gave them the courtesy of the truth even when it cost him.

I will give my notice in May. Our last day of work is June 12th.

The Number That Was Stopping Us

Getting Mollie and Samson to Europe had been quoted to us at $16,000 to $20,000. Both of them in cabin, the only option we would consider — neither of them is going in cargo, and that conversation has never been open. Mollie is turning seventeen in June. Samson carries a trauma history that makes separation intolerable for him. They fly with us or we find another way.

$20,000 for flights before we had paid first month's rent anywhere felt like the number that might stop us. It sat in the middle of every spreadsheet like a wall.

And then I found Vicuna Air.

One passenger. Both dogs in cabin. $11,150.

Kelly takes a separate regular flight. Total cost for all four of us: approximately $12,000.

We stared at that number for a long time. Eight thousand dollars less than the lowest estimate we had been working with. Eight thousand dollars that suddenly changed what was possible.

That was the moment the plan became real.

What We Are Actually Doing

We land in England on August 6th.

England is not in the Schengen zone. As Americans we can stay up to six months without a visa — no income threshold, no savings requirement, no paperwork beyond our passports. Six months. An entire English summer and autumn on the right side of the Atlantic, with the dogs, with our laptops, with time to build the income that will eventually qualify us for the visa we want.

While we are there we are applying to work/stay programs — Wwoof, Workaway, HelpX. These are established platforms that connect travelers with farms, guesthouses, retreats, and other properties that offer room and board in exchange for roughly twenty to twenty-five hours of work per week. We have a farming background. Kelly has practical skills that will serve any property well. I have organizational and wellness skills that translate across a dozen different contexts. We are strong candidates. If the work/stay programs come through the way we hope, our living costs during the English stay could be minimal — which extends our runway considerably.

We are also, with genuine hope and realistic expectation, anticipating that being in-country will change the remote work picture. Companies are not inclined to hire someone who is not yet in the country. Once we are there, that changes. I am applying now and will keep applying from inside England the moment we land.

The Drive Down

When England gets cold — late autumn, probably — we load everyone into a van and drive south.

We are looking at purchasing a Sprinter van from Germany. Affordable, left-hand drive which is what we are used to from the States, and built to carry two people and two dogs with a bed and storage and enough space to be genuinely comfortable on the road. It gives us flexibility, it gives the dogs stability, and it means we are not dependent on finding accommodation every time we want to stay somewhere a little longer.

France first. Then Spain. Then Portugal. Driving through the countries we have always wanted to live in, staying in each place long enough to actually know it — to feel the pace of it, to understand the cost of it, to know whether it is a place we could build a life. No rushing. No itinerary that can't be changed. Just us and the dogs and the open road pointing south toward the warmth.

When we find the place — the city, the village, the neighborhood that feels like the answer to the question we have been asking for years — we will be there in person to apply for the visa. With income established. With the firsthand knowledge of where we want to be. With the ability to walk into an apartment or villa and say yes, this is the one.

The Cross-Country Drive

Before any of that, there is the matter of getting from Bend, Oregon to New York City.

We are renting a car after July 12th. (After my favorite band plays in Bend. We are loading Mollie and Samson into the back. We are driving across the entire country — the long way, the right way, the way that lets us stop in Ohio for a few days with Krista and her family before we cross the ocean.

Kelly is sad about the Volvo. I want to name this because it deserves to be named. The XC90 T8 — a car he genuinely loves, a car that has been reliable and beautiful and his — is being sold. We are selling it the way we have sold most things in this chapter: because the life we are going to matters more than the things we are leaving behind, and because every dollar from the sale is a day of runway in England or a tank of gas driving through France. He knows this. He accepts it. He is still allowed to be sad about it, and he is.

The Numbers

We will have approximately $25,000 to $30,000 cash when we land.

I am not going to pretend that is a large number for two people and two dogs starting over in another country. It is not a large number. It requires the work/stay programs to work. It requires the online income to start moving. It requires Kelly's bookkeeping business to find its first clients. It requires this blog and Field & Frequency to start converting readers into the community they are being built to become.

It requires, as most things in our life have required, a combination of resourcefulness and faith and a willingness to do whatever it takes.

We have done this before. I sold my house and car and moved to Arizona alone at thirty-three with less certainty than we have now. We built a life on ten acres in southern Oregon from scratch. We took a leap of faith together and moved back to Arizona (back for me, first time for Kelly). We survived a pandemic layoff and rebuilt. We have always found our way through.

This time we are finding our way through to somewhere that has been waiting for us.

Why I Am Writing This Now

Because I promised you the whole messy beautiful terrifying truth of it, and this is that truth.

The plan was never clean. It went through Mexico and visa thresholds and Roots Global meetings and airline research and spreadsheets that didn't add up and moments of genuine uncertainty about whether we could actually do this. It went through Kelly quietly giving his notice and me counting down the days and both of us standing in Peg's house in Bend looking at each other across a pile of things we are deciding whether to keep or sell.

It went through all of that to get here: August 6th. England. The dogs in the cabin. The van we will buy in Germany. The farms we will work on. The road south when the cold comes. The place we will eventually find and name and stay in.

The road to Spain — or France, or Portugal, or wherever we land — goes through England first.  Through the sale of a Volvo that Kelly loved. Through six months of work/stay farms and laptops and walks with Mollie through the English countryside.

It goes through all of that.

And I would not have it any other way.

We leave August 6th. Follow along — it's going to be a real one.

Why We're Doing This — The RA Journey

We Sold Everything | April 2026

I have always listened to my body.

Even when the world around me wasn't ready for that conversation. Even when listening meant standing apart from the people around me, making choices they didn't understand, following an inner knowing that I couldn't always justify with evidence. From the time I was twelve years old and walked away from a PBS documentary about baby seals and declared myself a vegetarian — on a farm in rural Minnesota, in the 1980s, where this made absolutely no sense to anyone around me — I have been someone who listens when the body speaks.

Which is why it took me so long to understand what was happening to me. Because I was listening. I was doing everything right. And my body kept getting louder anyway.

It Started in One Finger

It started in my left index finger.

Excruciatingly painful. But intermittent — it would flare and then disappear, then move to another finger, then vanish again as though it had never been there. On my daily walks I noticed a fullness and stiffness in my hands that would ease slightly by the time I got home. Strange. Manageable. Easy to dismiss.

I went to my doctor. Blood tests came back normal. I was told I was fine and sent on my way.

So I kept going, the way you do, because what choice did you have.

Over the following months and years the symptoms spread and deepened. What had begun in one finger moved to every finger, both wrists, my shoulders, my knees, my toes, my ankles, and eventually my right jaw. The fatigue arrived alongside it — not tiredness, but a heaviness that made ordinary activities feel monumental. Things I had always done without thinking became effortful. Then impossible for stretches of time. And still, every time I went to a doctor, the blood work came back normal. I was fine. There was nothing wrong.

Two years is a long time to know something is wrong and be told you are fine.

I want to say that plainly, because I know I am not the only one who has lived inside that sentence. The dismissal of women's pain and women's bodies by the medical system is not a new story. It is not even a surprising story. But living inside it — being the person who knows, who keeps going back, who keeps being sent home — is a particular kind of lonely that is hard to explain to someone who hasn't been there.

Doing Everything Right

I had been dismissed enough times and read enough on my own that by the time the symptoms had been going on for two years, I had convinced myself this was menopause-induced joint pain. Of course it was. After years of having the worst PMS of anyone I knew, I said it to myself with a kind of dark humor that had become familiar. My body had always had opinions. This was just the latest one.

That same spring I decided to take matters into my own hands — the way I have always eventually taken matters into my own hands when the people who are supposed to help haven't.

I eliminated nearly everything from my diet. No dairy, no meat, no sugar, no alcohol, no corn, no preservatives, no oils, no caffeine, no gluten. Just fruits, vegetables, rice, and beans. I returned to acupuncture. I went back to therapy, this time specifically addressing the psychoneuroimmunological connection — the relationship between emotional stress and physical inflammation — and doing somatic work. I began meditating every day.

I was doing everything right.

And then in July I had the largest flare of my life.

I woke up completely incapable of movement. My arms, hands, fingers, knees, jaw, ankles — everything. A quarter inch of movement was excruciating in a way I had never experienced before and hope never to experience again. Very carefully, very slowly, Kelly helped me into the car and drove me to urgent care.

The PA who saw me took one look. She didn't run tests first. She looked at me — at my hands, my face, the way I was holding my body — and she said:

Everything you have described and everything I am seeing is classic rheumatoid arthritis.

I was shocked. And then I was relieved. And then came something more complicated than either of those things — a deep, frustrated recognition that I had been right all along, that my body had been telling the truth all along, and that the burden of figuring it out had fallen almost entirely on me. That this was not the first time. That it would probably not be the last.

What Rheumatoid Arthritis Actually Is

RA is not the arthritis most people picture — the wear-and-tear kind that comes with age. It is an autoimmune condition, which means my immune system, rather than protecting me, has turned on my own tissue. It attacks the lining of my joints, causing inflammation, pain, swelling, and over time, if unmanaged, damage that cannot be undone.

They say it is not curable. But it is manageable. And the distinction between those two things has become one of the most important organizing principles of my life.

The medical establishment's primary answer is pharmaceutical — disease-modifying drugs that suppress the immune system and reduce inflammation. These drugs work for many people and I am not here to tell anyone what to do with their own body. But they come with significant side effects, require ongoing monitoring, and do not address the underlying conditions that contributed to the disease in the first place.

I want to be honest with you about something, because this blog is nothing if not completely honest.

I take the medication.

I have to. Without it I cannot function — the acute pain and the existential fatigue that come with this diagnosis are not things I can think or meditate or supplement my way through on their own. Not yet. The medication allows me to get through the day, to walk with the dogs, to write, to plan, to be present with Kelly in the ways that matter. Without it, none of that is possible in the way I need it to be.

I find this deeply, almost painfully ironic. I am a woman who has valued the natural path her entire life — who grew up on a farm growing organic vegetables with her family, before that word existed in rural Minnesota, who walked away from meat at twelve, who spent decades choosing acupuncture and herbal medicine and somatic therapy over pharmaceutical solutions. And here I am, unable to function without prescription drugs for the first time in my life. Forced into the very system I have always questioned by a body that left me no other viable choice.

The irony goes deeper. If I had been diagnosed with cancer, there would be a clear and well-documented natural path laid before me — decades of anecdotal evidence and growing scientific study pointing toward diet, meditation, and alternative healing as genuine interventions. That literature is rich and available and real. For rheumatoid arthritis and autoimmune conditions, that path is not yet as clear or as documented. I am researching. I am working on it. I believe it exists. But I have not found it yet in a form that allows me to let go of the medication without losing my ability to live my life. I’ll keep you posted as I journey through this.

So I do both. I take the medication that keeps me functional, and I pursue every alternative path available to me — the diet, the acupuncture, the nervous system regulation work, the climate change, the somatic therapy, the Dispenza meditations, the research. I hold the pharmaceutical intervention and the integrative healing practice in the same hands at the same time, because right now that is what the reality requires.

I am not at peace with this yet. I am working toward it.

What I have chosen, in addition to the medication, is to refuse the idea that pharmaceutical management is the only path available to me.

Dr. Gabor Maté's work has been central to this understanding. His framework — that autoimmune conditions often have roots in chronic stress, emotional suppression, and the nervous system's long-term dysregulation — does not assign blame. It offers compassion. It says: your body was trying to survive. It did what it needed to do. Now let's figure out what it needs in order to heal.

I am figuring that out. Slowly, honestly, with Kelly's full support and more hope than I have had at any previous point in this journey.

What I Have Learned

The research on climate and autoimmune conditions is consistent and clear: warm, dry climates reduce inflammatory symptoms in a measurable way. Vitamin D — which the body produces through sun exposure — plays a direct role in immune regulation. Cold, grey, damp climates do the opposite.

I had already felt this intuitively before I knew it intellectually. When we left Oregon for Arizona years ago, something shifted in me that I couldn't fully name at the time. The sunshine did something. The warmth did something. My body moved differently in it. My mood was different. My energy was different.

Spain, with its Mediterranean climate, is not a dream destination with a health benefit attached. For my body, it is the destination because of the health benefit. The warmth is the prescription. The vitamin D is the medicine. The slowing down — the slow living, the walking, the unhurried pace of Mediterranean culture — is the nervous system regulation that no pill has yet offered me.

This move is not just about adventure. It is about healing.

I also understand now, in a way I did not fully understand before the diagnosis, the connection between the chronic stress of an unlived life and the inflammation that resulted from it. I spent decades knowing I was supposed to be somewhere else, doing something else, living differently — and suppressing that knowing in favor of practicality, safety, the voice of fear over the flash of knowing. That suppression has a cost. The body keeps the score, as Bessel van der Kolk so precisely named it. Mine was keeping it in my joints.

Moving to Europe is not just the adventure I always knew I would have.

It is, quite literally, part of how I intend to get well.

What This Means for the Blog

I will write about the RA journey honestly and in real time — what I am doing, what is working, what isn't, what the research says, what my body says when the two disagree. I will write about the climate shift and whether it makes the difference I believe it will. I will write about managing a chronic illness in a country where I do not yet speak the language and am building a new healthcare relationship from scratch.

I will not be a wellness influencer. I will not sell you a protocol or promise you a cure. I will tell you what I know and what I don't, what I've tried and what it did, and I will be honest about the hard days alongside the good ones.

Because that is the only kind of writing I know how to do.

And because somewhere out there is a woman who has been told she is fine for two years when she knows she is not. Who is doing everything right and still waking up some mornings unable to move. Who is carrying the burden of figuring out her own health because the system hasn't figured it out for her.

This is for her.

You are not imagining it. Your body is not lying. And you are not alone.

Next — the pivot. Why the road to Spain goes through somewhere unexpected first, and what Widespread Panic has to do with all of it.

Why We’re Doing This — Kelly’s Story

We Sold Everything | April 2026

There are people who move through the world loudly, who announce themselves, who fill a room with their presence and their need to be known.

Kelly is not one of those people.

He is the man in the corner of the room who has already noticed everything and everyone in it — who has already decided what he thinks, what he feels, what matters — and who will tell you none of it unless you earn the right to ask. He is the man whose actions are so consistently thoughtful that the people who love him sometimes have to stop and just sit with the fact of him for a moment, because it's a lot to take in.

He is also, if I'm being honest, the reason I am writing this blog at all. Because without Kelly, there is no Europe. There is no decision, no courage, no sense that the life I had been becoming myself for had finally arrived.

But to understand Kelly, you have to go back. All the way back. Because his story, like mine, started long before we found each other. And it started, of all places, in the middle of a war.

A War Bride and the Thread She Started

Kelly's grandfather was injured in Europe during World War II. While recovering in England he met the woman who would become his wife — a woman who left everything she knew to cross the Atlantic and build a life in Oregon with a man she had met in the middle of a war. She arrived in America as a war bride in the truest sense: brave, uprooted, beginning again in a country that was not her own.

She is the reason Kelly has always had one foot in England. And she is, in ways neither of us fully understood until recently, the reason moving to Europe has always felt less like leaving and more like returning.

Kelly grew up visiting English cousins, aunts, and uncles who crossed the Atlantic to see the family. As an adult he made the journey the other direction — traveling to Chelmsford, and later to Laxfield, a quieter village further east, to spend time with the family his grandmother had left behind but never lost. He has been three times. Once with me — a trip that took us through England, then France, then a long weekend in Dublin that was, in a word, extraordinary.

To travel with Kelly in England was to understand something about him that his Oregon life didn't fully show. He moved through it like someone who recognized it. Not as a tourist. As someone with a claim.

His grandmother's decision, made in the wreckage of a war, put something in motion that is still moving. We are following the thread she started.

A Family That Moved Through the World

Kelly's mother has her own version of this story. The second oldest of five children, she was an Army brat in the truest sense — her father was Special Forces, and the family followed him. Puerto Rico. Guam. Florida. New Hampshire. Eventually back to Bend, where she had been born, after her father retired. She grew up knowing that home was something you carried with you, not something fixed to a single address.

That orientation toward movement shaped the family Kelly grew up in. And it expressed itself year after year in the way they chose to spend their time together.

At sixteen, Kelly got his scuba certification with his dad. His mom and older brother followed soon after. For the next twenty years the family dove — the Bahamas, the Cayman Islands, Costa Rica, Belize, Roatan, dozens of trips in large groups with the close-knit family friends his parents had maintained since high school. They dove and they laughed and they celebrated being alive in warm water with people they loved.

In the summers, the family loaded up the speedboat and headed to Central Oregon's high desert lakes — water skiing from the time Kelly was small, the same group of friends year after year, a kind of reliable joy he grew up inside of. They rented houseboats and brought the speedboat to Lake Shasta, spending full weeks on the water.

Travel was not a luxury in this family. It was a language. It was a way of life.

The Long Way Around

There is a quiet intensity to Kelly. He played football in high school, enjoying the thrill of a tackle. Before college he spent a year in heavy construction — helping build the roads and infrastructure for what would become Bend's original Costco and others. He returned to that work each summer as he made his way through the University of Oregon, where he graduated with a Bachelor’s degree, majoring in exercise and movement science and minors in biology and chemistry.

What followed was nine years at St. Charles Hospital in Bend, working as a phlebotomist and lab technician — nine years of precision and protocol and the particular exhaustion that comes from caring deeply in a system that doesn't always make space for that. He was good at it. He burned out on it. Both things were true and eventually the second one won.

So he left. He managed a Wine Styles franchise owned by his aunt. He worked at Whole Foods. And slowly, across those years, he started to understand something about himself. He was an introvert. Not shy, not withdrawn — but someone powered by stillness rather than stimulation. Someone who felt drained rather than energized by large gatherings he had genuinely enjoyed. Someone whose best life involved early mornings, good coffee, long walks with his dog Reef, and the particular contentment of solitude chosen rather than imposed.

Reef was his dog before I was his person. By the time we met, Kelly had made a certain peace with the life he had built — simple, uncluttered, his own. He had decided, without quite deciding, that this was probably it.

It was during his Whole Foods years that we met at the Bend Brewfest on a summer evening that neither of us knew would matter. I was working at a nonprofit serving people experiencing homelessness. A few conversations in, Kelly found his way there too. That is the kind of person he is — you tell him about work that matters and he moves toward it.

We worked together at the community center for a couple of years. Then we moved to southern Oregon and spent six years in the cannabis world — farming, growing our own food, cutting our own firewood, living simply and completely on ten acres in a way that most people only romanticize. When the power went out for a week, we were fine. We cooked on the woodstove. We thrived.

The Travel Agent Chapter

Then came Arizona, and Authentic Vacations, where we both eventually worked —we specialized in Western Europe. The UK, Ireland, France. The countries that had shaped his family history, the geography he came to know without ever having lived inside it. He built those trips for other people: the train connections, the hidden villages, the itineraries that let someone from Ohio feel, just briefly, like they belonged somewhere ancient and beautiful.

His trips for work took him to Manchester, Liverpool, Wales, the Lake District. Mine took me to York, Alnwick, Nottingham and Scotland. We were covering the same ground from different directions, both of us deepening a relationship with a place that mattered to us.

The irony is not lost on either of us. The man whose grandmother crossed the Atlantic as a war bride. The man who grew up diving warm water and water skiing Oregon lakes and visiting English cousins and learning the train schedules of Western Europe so he could send other people there.

He was always going. He just hadn't gotten there himself yet.

And then the pandemic came and took that world apart.

The layoff was swift and indiscriminate, the way those things are. The travel industry didn't slow — it stopped. Overnight. Kelly became a pool technician in Fountain Hills, maintaining backyard pools for clients who had no idea that the man fixing their equipment had once studied anatomy and helped build roads and learned the geography of Western Europe intimately enough to design other people's dreams.

He did it without complaint. With competence. With the particular grace of a man who has made peace with the idea that not every chapter needs to be impressive. Some chapters just need to be useful.

It was on one of those pool routes that he met Mollie. But that is her story, and we have already told it.

Who He Is

Kelly is an uncomplicated, quiet man. He likes quality. He notices beauty. He has also lived without complaint in a one-bedroom mobile home on ten acres, cutting firewood, growing food, making do with what was there and finding it sufficient.

He is the most thoughtful person I have ever known.

When his brother went into liver failure, Kelly stopped drinking — without being asked, without announcement — because there was a chance he might be able to donate part of his liver and he wanted to be available if that moment came. It didn't come. But he had already decided.

When I was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis and had to overhaul my diet completely, Kelly changed his diet too. He took over the cooking because my fingers and wrists hurt too much to cut vegetables and prepare meals. He paid attention to my rhythms, planned our weekends around my energy, researched every healing modality he could find, supported every acupuncture appointment, bought me a red light therapy device.

He did all of this quietly. Without fanfare. Without expecting anything in return.

He shows love through action rather than declaration — and his actions, when you are paying attention, are almost overwhelming in their consistency.

His Father

Kelly's father had been disappearing for years before he died — Parkinson's and dementia taking him slowly, piece by piece. His mother Peg had been his sole caregiver, carrying that role with the fierce love and quiet exhaustion of someone who doesn't know how to do things halfway.

For the last three years of his father's life, Peg brought him to stay with us in the winters in Arizona. We were there for the late-night dementia episodes — Kelly's dad waking disoriented and frightened, convinced he needed to leave, struggling toward the front door with a certainty that overrode everything else. Kelly would stand in the doorway and hold him back — his own father, confused and frightened, pushing against him — and speak quietly until it passed.

His dad thought he wanted to go home. But even at home he had wanted to go home. He no longer knew what that meant. He no longer knew where that was.

There is a particular grief in watching someone disappear before they leave. Kelly carried that grief for years without many words. He is not a man who processes out loud. When his father finally died, the loss was quiet and deeply felt in exactly the way you would expect from a man like him. Tears streaming sometimes, silently. Other times stony, somewhere else, unreachable in the way grief makes people unreachable.

I held his hand. I held him when he let me. I didn't try to fill the silence.

His father had not always been emotionally available to him. Kelly had wanted more closeness than was ever quite offered, in the way some children spend their whole lives quietly wanting more from a parent who simply couldn't give it. Losing him meant losing the possibility of that closeness ever arriving. It meant grieving not just the man who died but the relationship that never fully became what Kelly had hoped it might.

That grief does not announce itself. For Kelly it built a silent determination to make a life of his own. With the love that he had now, with me, with his dogs. Us.

Now

When it became clear that Peg was struggling — that she had never lived alone and was facing that reality for the first time — Kelly didn't deliberate. We packed up and moved to Bend.

He now works at a local nonprofit, in the weatherization division — helping people get their homes safe and energy-efficient, insulation and air sealing and the unglamorous infrastructure of warmth for people who can't always afford it on their own.

A phlebotomist. A lab tech. A construction worker. A wine shop manager. A cannabis farmer. A travel specialist. A pool technician. An energy auditor.

Look at the list long enough and the thread becomes visible. Kelly has spent his entire adult life in service — of bodies, of systems, of land, of travelers, of homes, of people who needed something fixed or held or made possible. The container has changed constantly. The intention underneath it never really has.

Moving to Europe is not random for Kelly. It is not impulsive. It is not even surprising, when you know the whole story.

His grandmother left England to start over in a country that wasn't hers. His mother grew up following her father across continents and learned that home is something you carry. Kelly grew up underwater in warm water and on the water in Oregon summers and in the living rooms of English cousins and in the logistics of other people's European dreams.

He has been preparing for this his whole life. He just didn't have a word for it yet.

In Spain or Portugal or France — wherever we land — he will be closer to his English family than he has ever been as an adult. A short flight from the country his grandmother chose, from the place that sent her across an ocean and changed everything. There is something in that proximity that I believe will matter to him in ways neither of us can fully articulate yet.

He will not say so. He is not that kind of man.

But I know him. And I know it will.

Next — the illness that changed everything. Two years of knowing something was wrong and being told we were fine.

The Night I Thought I Might Be a Good Person

We Sold Everything | April 2026

I was nineteen years old. I was lying on the ground next to a campfire somewhere in the mountains between Eugene and Bend, Oregon looking up at a night sky so full of stars it felt like an argument for something I couldn't quite name yet.

My dog Shasta was next to me. I had my hand in her fur. My friends were nearby — Brittany and a couple of others, good people, the kind of people who drive up into the mountains looking for hot springs and have a great time anyway when they can't find them, which we didn't. We had eaten mushrooms earlier and explored around the campsite and now we were settled, quiet, the fire doing what fires do.

I was thinking about my life. About my friends. About who they were and what I saw in them when I looked clearly. And what I saw was: good people. Genuinely good people. People with something real in them.

And then, very quietly, a thought arrived that I was completely unprepared for.

If they are good people, and they like me — maybe I am a good person too.

I lay there with Shasta and the stars and let that thought sit in me for a long time. It was not a loud thought. It did not arrive with any fanfare. But it landed in a place that had been empty for as long as I could remember, and it has stayed there ever since.

That was the first time in my nineteen years of living that I had ever genuinely considered the possibility that I might be okay.

I want to tell you what had to be true about a person before that thought could feel like a revelation rather than an obvious given.

I grew up in a home where scolding sometimes went beyond scolding. My mother was afraid — deeply, genuinely afraid — that my sister and I would end up like her family, a family carrying damage that ran deep and wide and had shaped her in ways she was still reckoning with. I understand that fear now. I understand where it came from and why she felt it so urgently. But the way it expressed itself was in a kind of damning — not just of our behavior, but of who we were as people. The message, received early and absorbed completely, was that something about me was fundamentally wrong. That I needed to be driven toward goodness through fear because left to my own devices I could not be trusted to find it myself.

I believed that. For a very long time I believed it completely.

I grew up willing — almost eager — to accept that I was in the wrong if anyone thought so, at any time, for any reason. It was easier than defending myself. Easier than risking the possibility that they were right and I was what I feared I was. I had no framework for being okay. I had no evidence that okay was available to me.

I spent hours in my high school counselor's office. Talking, sharing, looking for something I could only call hope. I didn't have a word for what I was looking for then. I just knew I was looking. I knew there was something more than what I had been handed and I was desperate to find it.

The low self-esteem created a ceiling I couldn't see clearly but ran into constantly. I could move — God, I could move, I was good at moving, at picking up and going somewhere new and starting over with a clean slate. But I could only go so far. The semesters in college I started but couldn't finish. The relationship that ended at eighteen months because something in me didn't know how to stay past the point where being truly known became possible. The yes I wanted to say but found a no coming out of my mouth instead because wanting something and believing you deserved it were two completely different things and I had only ever managed the first one.

My theme songs in those years were Ramble On by Led Zeppelin and Rambling Man by The Allman Brothers. Later, once I found Widespread Panic, Driving Song. I wore these songs like a philosophy. Movement as freedom. Movement as identity. I told myself I was someone who didn't stay put, as though that were a character trait rather than a coping mechanism. As though the running were chosen rather than compelled.

It wasn't until much later that I understood the difference.

My cosmic soul sister, Krista understood it before I did, I think. We met in Yellowstone — she was everything I was not. Bold where I was quiet. Unafraid to say exactly what she was thinking or feeling while I was still measuring every word against what people might think of me. She valued academia and committed to it completely — four-year degree, then her master's. She wanted children and had two extraordinary daughters. She knew what she wanted and moved toward it with a directness I could only watch and quietly marvel at.

We had the same wounds underneath. The same complicated mothers, the same difficult childhoods, the same things we were both trying to outrun or overcome. But she had found a way to move through the world as though she was allowed to be in it. As though she had already settled the question of her own worthiness.

I was still trying to find the question, let alone the answer.

The gift certificate to The Curiosity Shoppe had come a few years earlier, and it cracked something open. The books. The herbalist. The astrologer. The community of women who met me exactly where I was and didn't suggest I needed to be anywhere else first. The Alchemist told me to follow the signs, to trust what I felt, to have faith in the path even when I couldn't see it. I held onto that with both hands.

And still. Still the ceiling. Still the semester I couldn't finish. Still only able to go so far before something in me called a halt and I moved on instead of through.

At twenty-five I started working with at-risk teenage girls at a wilderness program. I devoured every training, every manual, every framework I could find. I knew — I knew in a way that was almost uncomfortable — that everything I was learning applied to me as much as to them. That the girl who emerged from the tent each morning with new light in her eyes was a version of the girl I had been. That the work I was doing with them was also the work I was doing on myself, one conversation, one campfire, one five-mile graduation hike at a time.

I kept reading. I kept going to therapy — a few months here, two years there, always returning when life got loud enough that I needed the container of it. I kept using every tool I could find. Mushrooms, in those years, as both recreation and something closer to ceremony — always spending time alone first, opening myself up to possibility, hoping I would learn something I hadn't known before. Slowly, slowly, the ceiling lifted.

Then I found Brené Brown. Her story resonated with something so deep in me I can still feel the first time I encountered her work — the shame research, the vulnerability, the radical idea that the thing you think disqualifies you is actually the thing that connects you most fully to other people. That the story you tell yourself about being fundamentally broken is not the truth. That worthiness is not something you earn. That you were allowed to be here all along.

I read her the way I had read The Alchemist. With both hands. With relief.

I am still in this work. I want to be honest about that.

I have made progress that is, by any measure, tremendous. The girl who lay by that fire at nineteen and had the terrifying quiet thought that she might be okay has come a long way from that campsite. But there are still fundamental lessons about self-love and boundaries and how I see myself that I have not yet fully learned. It is complicated and messy and ongoing, the way real growth always is.

And then came the RA.

Rheumatoid arthritis is an autoimmune condition — which means, in the most literal sense, that my body is attacking itself. When I received that diagnosis, alongside the devastation and the relief of finally having an answer, something else arrived: a recognition that hit me somewhere very deep. I had spent my entire life learning about the psychoneuroimmunological link — the connection between emotional pain and physical illness, between chronic stress and inflammation, between the stories we carry in our nervous systems and the ways our bodies eventually respond to them. I had read Gabor Maté and Bessel van der Kolk and Candace Pert. I had done the somatic work and the therapy and the meditation.

And still. Still my body had found a way to make the inside visible on the outside. Still the pain and the fear and the exhaustion of a lifetime had expressed themselves in the most direct language a body knows.

I am not saying this with blame. I am saying it with compassion — for myself, finally, more and more. My body was not betraying me. My body was communicating with me, the way it always has, the way it always does for all of us, in the only language it has available when we haven't yet heard the quieter ones.

The RA became a crash course in healing at a level I had not previously considered. And Spain — the warm dry Mediterranean climate that is genuinely better for autoimmune symptoms — is not just a dream. It is part of the prescription.

This blog is the journey to Spain. But it is also — it has always also been — a healing journey. The two are not separate. They never were.

That is what Field & Frequency is. A concept you will see in more depth throughout this boEverything I have learned and am still learning, offered to other women who are living some version of this story — the ceiling, the running, the body that finally says enough, the long slow beautiful work of becoming the person you always hoped you might be.

It began at a campfire at nineteen, with my hand in my dog's fur and the stars overhead and a thought so quiet it almost didn't arrive.

Maybe I am a good person too.

I have been building on that thought ever since.

Next — Kelly's story. A different kind of becoming, told with the same honesty.

Why We Sold Everything

People ask us this all the time. Sometimes with admiration, sometimes with confusion, occasionally with something that looks a little like envy. Why did you sell everything?

The honest answer is that there was no single moment. There was an accumulation of them — quiet at first, then louder, then impossible to ignore.

We are Lainie and Kelly. A married couple in our mid-fifties who have never really done things the conventional way, and who stopped apologizing for that a long time ago.

We met on a summer evening at the Bend Brewfest — Kelly working at Whole Foods, me at a nonprofit serving people experiencing homelessness. Three weeks after we met we were living together. Fifteen years later we are still in the same room by choice, still working side by side when life allows it, still the first person the other one wants to tell things to. We fell fast and we fell hard and neither of us has ever quite recovered, which suits us both just fine.

We have not lived a conventional life together. We grew cannabis off the land on ten acres in southern Oregon — farming, growing our own food, cutting our own firewood, living simply and completely. When the power went out for a week we were fine. We cooked on the woodstove. We had a full pantry. We thrived.

We moved to Arizona for the sunshine and the warmth and because we had both felt, independently and then together, that grey skies were costing us something we couldn't fully name. We worked in travel, specializing in Western Europe — building other people's dream trips to the countries we quietly grew to understand that we would live in ourselves one day.

And then the pandemic came and took that world apart, and we rebuilt, and kept going, the way we all did through that time.

Through all of it there was a knowing. Quiet at first. One day we will go. Not a plan exactly, Kelly knew long before I did — this was more like a compass bearing. A direction we were always pointing toward even when life required us to point somewhere else first.

Then two things happened that made the quiet knowing into something louder.

Kelly lost his dad.

His father had been disappearing for years before he died — Parkinson's and dementia taking him slowly, piece by piece. Kelly had wanted more closeness than was ever quite offered between them, and losing his dad meant losing the possibility of that closeness ever arriving. It is a particular kind of grief, quiet and deeply felt, that does not announce itself. It settles into the body and stays.

When his father died, we looked at each other and understood something that we had perhaps always known but had not yet said plainly: life does not wait. It does not hold its breath while you finish getting ready. It moves, with or without you, and the only question is whether you are moving with it.

Around the same time, I was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis.

It had taken two years to get that diagnosis — two years of joint pain spreading from one finger to every finger, both wrists, my shoulders, my knees, my jaw. Two years of being told by doctors that my blood work was normal and I was fine. Two years of knowing something was wrong and being sent home anyway. The diagnosis arrived after the worst flare of my life — a morning when I woke completely unable to move, every joint screaming, Kelly carefully helping me into the car and driving me to urgent care.

The PA who saw me took one look and said: everything you are describing is classic rheumatoid arthritis.

I was shocked. Then relieved. Then something more complicated — a deep frustrated recognition that the burden of figuring out what was wrong with my own body had fallen almost entirely on me. That is a story for another post. What matters here is what came after.

They say RA is not curable. But it is manageable. And one of the most consistent things in the research is this: warm, dry climates make a measurable difference in symptom management. We had already felt this when we left Oregon for Arizona — the sunshine had done something for both of us that grey skies never could. Spain, with its Mediterranean climate and abundant vitamin D, is not just a dream destination for us.

For my body, it is genuinely the right place to be.

So we made the decision.

We sold nearly everything. We moved in with Kelly's mom in Bend — both to be there for her through her first year of living alone after losing Kelly's dad, and to save money and plan. We spent this time writing, researching, building the online businesses that will sustain us, and pointing ourselves with increasing certainty toward a different life.

We are late bloomers in the best possible sense. Late to find each other. Late to settle down. And now choosing to bloom again in a country — in countries — that feel like they were waiting for us.

The road has shifted a little since we first started planning — life has a way of doing that, and we will tell you all about it as we go. But the direction has not changed. The dream has not changed. The knowing that started quiet and became something we could no longer ignore has not changed.

We sold everything because we ran out of reasons not to.

We sold everything because Kelly's dad died and my joints started screaming and we looked at each other and understood that someday is not a real place on any map we have ever seen.

We sold everything because the conventional path never quite fit the shape of who we are, and we stopped trying to make it fit a long time ago.

We sold everything because the dogs deserve to feel Mediterranean sunshine on their faces.

And because we do too.

Follow along. We are telling this honestly and in real time — the whole messy, beautiful, terrifying truth of it. Subscribe below so you don't miss what comes next.

Meet Mollie

We Sold Everything | April 2026

There is a certain kind of person who, upon meeting Mollie for the first time, looks down at this small dark dog and makes the mistake of underestimating her.

They don't make it twice.

Mollie is a 25-pound Manchester Terrier. She will turn seventeen in June 2026. She has been running this household since the day she arrived, and she has never once questioned her authority to do so. She is the first one anyone greets when they walk through the door — not because we have trained anyone to do this, but because Mollie has. She simply appears, and people understand instinctively that this is the one who matters.

She is also, if I'm being honest, the reason half of you are here.

How She Found Us

Kelly was working as a pool technician in Fountain Hills, Arizona — maintaining backyard pools for clients across the neighborhood — when he met Mollie. She belonged to one of his clients, a woman who had passed away from cancer. The family, unable to keep her, was preparing to surrender her to a shelter.

Kelly came home that evening and practically begged.

Here is the part that still makes me laugh. I had been lobbying for another dog for months. Kelly had been the reluctant one — pumping the brakes, not quite ready, not quite sure. He had been the one saying not yet while I quietly kept making my case. So when he walked through the door that evening with the careful expression of a man preparing to argue for something he wasn't sure he could win, I let him get about halfway through his pitch before I stopped him.

I told him he had me at hello.

The relief on his face was something I will remember for a long time.

The Name

What we didn't know until Mollie's vet paperwork arrived — a few days after she came home with us — was the detail that sealed everything and made us certain she was always supposed to be ours.

When Mollie had been a stray in her first year of life, taken in by a shelter, the shelter had given her a name.

Lanie.

Spelled almost identically to mine.

I am not a person who dismisses these things. I never have been. I believe the universe communicates in exactly this kind of language — the quiet, specific, undeniable kind that you would have to work very hard to explain away. We took it as a sign. We still do. We always will.

She has collected many names since then. Boopy, Baby Boop, Little Peanut. Little Nut. Little Nut Nut. Mostly we just call her The Nut, or Nutty, which suits her completely and which she accepts with the dignity of someone who understands that a nickname is just another form of love.

Who She Is

Mollie came to us at almost twelve years old, which means she had already lived a full life before she became ours. She arrived knowing exactly who she was. She has never wavered on the subject.

She is the cuddliest little diva you have ever met. She sleeps on us most nights — finding the warmest spot, which is almost always on top of one of us, and settling there with the confidence of someone who has never once been asked to move and doesn't intend to start now. She is demanding in the best possible way. She expects to be included in everything and is frankly baffled when she isn't.

She also, somewhat late in life, discovered the profound joy of walking.

Once she discovered it, she never looked back. Since she has been with us, 5 years now, Mollie has gone out five to six days a week — A little chunky at first, she is now a lean mean walking machine who has taken this commitment seriously. Her world at first was her home, owning every inch of it. Then the neighborhood. She used to lead the way, setting the pace, nose forward, all business, absolutely certain of where she was going and how long it should take. She owned every route we ever walked together. We were in her neighborhood, and she let everyone know it.

The first few years we were living in Arizona, it was always hot, or at least warm and that suited her just fine. She is an Arizona girl through and through. Moving to Oregon this year meant fewer walks, her choice, she is a “fair-weathered” walker now. More about that in a moment.

What hasn’t changed is she is in charge of this family. She has always known it. We stopped pretending otherwise years ago.

Seventeen

Here’s the thing, she is turning seventeen in June. I want to sit with that for a moment, because it is both a miracle and a tenderness that is hard to hold sometimes.

Seventeen years is an extraordinary life for any dog. For a Manchester Terrier who spent her first year as a stray, who lost her first real home to cancer, who came to us at nearly twelve already shaped by a whole history we weren't part of — seventeen years feels like a testament to something essential in her. Her stubbornness. Her will. The particular invincibility of a small dog who has always believed herself to be much larger than she is.

But she is slowing down. And I see it every day now, in the small accumulations that I try not to catalog too carefully because the cataloging makes it too real.

Her eyesight is about half gone. Depth perception has become unreliable, and shadows at night are especially confusing for her — she'll hesitate at the edge of something dark, trying to read it, and I'll wait quietly while she figures it out. She sleeps longer during the day now, a little more each week it seems, and when she wakes there is a tiredness around her eyes that wasn't there a year ago. She doesn't jump as far or as accurately as she once did. I've learned to watch where her little body lands when she jumps onto the couch — she'll settle herself right at the edge of the ottoman without noticing, and I'll reach over and shift her gently before she slides off, and she'll look at me with the expression of someone who didn't need any help and would appreciate it if I remembered that.

On her walks she no longer leads. She walks behind me now, more slowly, stopping longer to smell things — really smell them, taking her time, unhurried in a way she never used to be. The route that used to be a march is now a wander.

I think she has earned the wander. I think she has always known things about how to move through the world that I am only now beginning to understand. An example I can learn from

The Question We Can't Quite Answer

She is the reason the logistics of this move keep Kelly and me up at night.

Getting Mollie and Samson to Europe — both of them in cabin with us, the way it has to be, because neither of them is going in cargo and that conversation is closed — will cost somewhere between $16,000 and $20,000. That is a real number. It takes a significant portion of what we have to work with, and it sits alongside the cost of visas and deposits and getting established somewhere new while our online income is still finding its footing.

We have looked at crossing by ship. There is something that moves me about that idea. But the ship option means Mollie and Samson would be in kennels by themselves at night for seven or eight nights. Alone in the dark without us. And I cannot do that to her. I cannot do that to either of them.

So we are holding the question. Turning it over. Some days the answer feels close and some days it doesn't.

And then there is the harder thing — the thing that I think about quietly, usually late at night, and that I am going to say here because this blog is the whole messy beautiful terrifying truth and I promised you that from the beginning.

Mollie is seventeen in June. The potential move to Mexico in case Europe didn’t work out— which we recently had to set aside for other reasons — would have been driveable. She could have come with us in the car, no separation, no cargo, no trauma. Europe is different. Europe is a flight or a ship and a crossing and a transition that her small aging body may or may not be ready for.

Sometimes Kelly and I wonder whether we should wait. Whether the kindest thing — the most loving thing — is to let her finish her extraordinary life in Oregon or somewhere warm and close, on her own schedule, surrounded by the people who love her most. Whether the Atlantic crossing, however carefully arranged, is simply too much to ask.

We have not answered that question. We are living inside it, the way you live inside the questions that matter most — carefully, and with as much grace as you can manage.

What I know for certain is this.

Mollie has been a stray. A shelter dog. A beloved companion who lost her person. A dog rehomed at nearly twelve to a man who begged and a woman who already knew the answer. She has walked five days a week owning her domain. She has slept on top of us every night. She has run this household with the quiet authority of someone who never needed a title to know her own power.

She arrived with a name that was almost mine. We took it as a sign.

Whatever the Atlantic holds — whether she crosses it or whether she finishes her remarkable life on this side of it — she will do it exactly as she has always done everything.

Warm. Loved. Certain she is exactly where she belongs.

She is not our pet. She is our family.

And wherever we go, we go together.

Next — meet Samson. His story is a different kind of love.

Meet Samson

We Sold Everything | April 2026

I knew before he arrived.

The foster coordinator insisted on keeping him on a leash when she brought him in — a precaution, she said, given his history and the two failed placements before us. I thanked her and said of course. And then Samson walked through our door, took one look at Mollie, took one look at our home, and within moments the leash came off.

Of course it did. He was already home. He just didn't know it yet.

Where He Came From

Samson is a Rhodesian Ridgeback, Chow Chow, and Lab mix — a big beautiful boy who arrived at our door weighing 60 pounds when he should have weighed 90. He had been used as a bait dog in dog fighting rings. Dumped. Left for dead. His body told the whole story without a single word — scars across his skin, a tear in his ear, a sternum broken and shifted slightly to the right, his back end underdeveloped from years of living in a cage too small for a dog his size. Body broken. He was emaciated. He could barely walk.

He had been through two foster placements before us, both unsuccessful. When the urgent call came asking if we could take him, I already knew before I answered that the leash they were bringing him in on would be unnecessary.

What I called fostering, I now understand was never fostering at all. What they call a foster fail, we call destiny.

The First Weeks

The first thing Samson did in our home was sleep.

He slept for weeks. Deep, still, unguarded sleep — the kind that only comes when a body has finally been given permission to stop surviving and just rest. We gave him the oversized Tempur-Pedic beds that had belonged to our beloved boy Reef, our previous dog, and I believe the comfort of those beds mattered more than I can prove. Something about that softness — something about finally having a surface that held him gently instead of a cage floor that didn't — I think it reached him somewhere beneath consciousness.

We started making his food from scratch immediately. Rotating organic meats, vegetables, supplements — everything researched, everything intentional. We still make his meals today, his and Mollie's both. We always will. It matters to us that they know their food comes from our hands.

There were moments in those first weeks, between the long stretches of sleep, when Samson was awake — mostly for meals, because Samson has always understood that meals are sacred and not to be missed. He loves his food with a sincerity, urgency and relief that I find deeply endearing. But in those wakeful moments, between bites and between sleeps, he would watch.

He watched everything.

One evening I was getting Mollie settled on the couch — tucking her blanket under and around her just so, the specific ritual she requires for optimal comfort, which has many steps and must be performed correctly or she will stare at you until you start over. I was doing this with the focused attention Mollie demands, and I happened to glance over at Samson.

He had lifted his head. Just slightly. Turned it just slightly to one side. And he was watching me tuck the blanket around this small bossy dog with the quiet, careful attention of someone witnessing something they don't quite have a name for yet.

I watched his face as he watched me. Something was shifting in it — slowly, almost imperceptibly, but I saw it. He was registering what love looks like when it moves through a room. He was filing it away. He was getting curious about what kind of life this might turn out to be.

I started talking to him then, in the softest voice I had. Telling him how happy we were that he was here. That he deserved a good life. A happy life. A loved life. That nothing that had happened to him before was going to happen to him here.

He didn't move. But he kept watching. And I kept talking.

Little by little, over the days that followed, he let me do a little more. Stay a little longer. Pet him a little further along his back before he'd shift away. Each small allowance was its own negotiation, its own quiet test. I tried to pass every one.

Learning to Walk

When we started going on walks, I shortened them considerably — his body was still healing, still building the muscle and stamina his years in a cage had taken from him, and I wanted him to set the pace and the distance. Not me. Him.

Within a month or so, as he was getting stronger and was no longer hungry and was beginning to understand that the love coming at him was consistent and wasn't going to stop, something opened up in him. He became more curious. More eager. He started to understand that walks meant the world, and the world was worth being excited about.

But the moment I will carry with me always happened at an intersection.

We had reached a corner — the kind of ordinary neighborhood corner where you simply choose a direction and keep walking — and Samson stopped. Just stopped, and stood there. And then, very slowly, he turned his head and looked down one direction of the street. Held it there for a moment. Then turned and looked down the other direction. Taking in both possibilities. Considering them.

I stood with him and waited.

It took me a moment to understand what I was seeing. But then I understood it completely, and it hit me somewhere I was not prepared for.

I don't think he had ever been on a walk before. I don't think he had ever stood at a corner and understood that the world extended in multiple directions and that he was allowed to choose one. I don't think he knew that neighborhoods like this existed — full of other dogs on leashes with their people, and parks with fountain paths, and familiar faces that would come to recognize him and be glad to see him. I don't think he knew any of it was available to him.

He was looking at it now. Both directions. Taking his time.

I stood with him and let him have every second of it.

Who He Is Now

Samson goes from 60 pounds to 90. His fur grew back velvety soft. A light came into his eyes that wasn't there before — I noticed the exact day it arrived and have never forgotten it.

He is a big goof. A bull in a china shop who has absolutely no idea how large and clumsy and magnificent he is. When it's time for a walk, his whole body gets involved in the announcement — tail whipping, body wiggling, the full production of a dog who has learned that good things are coming and has decided to feel that fully and without embarrassment. I love this about him more than I can say.

He rarely barks. In three years, perhaps four times. Part of this is because he was never allowed to use his voice. The other part because he is a pretty chill and sweet boy. He is calm and respectful and the easiest soul to share a home with. He loves meeting other dogs on walks — really loves it, the greeting, the sniffing, the brief joyful exchange between two creatures who both know what it is to be out in the world on a good day. Knowing what I know about where he came from, I believe he feels it every time. The normalcy of it. The safety of it. The fact that he gets to be like the other dogs — the ones who have only ever known this, who have never known anything else. He gets to be one of them now. A regular dog on a regular walk in a regular neighborhood where nothing terrible is waiting for him.

He is safe. I think he knows it. I think that is what all the curiosity is — a dog who spent years unable to look around, finally looking around, and finding that the world is better than he had any reason to believe.

Sammy and Kelly

Rhodesian Ridgebacks and Chow Chows are known for choosing one person and giving that person everything they have. Samson chose me. Given his history with men, we were not surprised that Kelly wasn't his first stop.

What surprised us — what moved us — was how quickly that changed.

We have always called Kelly the dog whisperer, because dogs have an inexplicable and consistent way of gravitating toward him. They always have. There is something in his stillness and his patience that animals seem to recognize as safe. So he did what he does — quietly, without forcing anything, with infinite patience and an endless supply of belly rubs and the good snacks — and he waited for Samson to come to him on Samson's timeline.

Watching that trust develop over the weeks and months was one of the most quietly beautiful things I have ever witnessed. There was no single moment, no dramatic turning point. Just patience, and time, and Kelly showing up the same way every day until Samson understood that this particular man was different from the men he had known before. That this one was safe. That this one was his.

Sammy truly loves his dad now. I am pretty sure Kelly loves him just as much, in the way that Kelly loves things — completely, without a lot of words about it, demonstrated daily in ways you have to be paying attention to catch.

We will never fully know what Samson lived through before he came to us. We will never know all of what was done to him or all of what he lost. His body told us what it could and we listened.

What we know now is who he is. Curious. Gentle. Goofy in the most joyful way. A dog who stands at intersections and looks both ways because the world is still new to him and he wants to take it in before he decides which direction to go.

He came to us broken and became whole. He came to us not knowing that a life like this existed, and now he lives it every single day.

He is not our pet. He is our family.

And he is coming to Spain.

Next — why we're really doing this. The whole story, told honestly.

Why We're Doing This — I Never Did Things the Conventional Way

We Sold Everything | April 2026

There is a thread that runs through my entire life. I can see it clearly now, looking back, though for a long time I couldn't see it at all — I was too busy living inside it.

The thread is this: I have always been moving toward something I didn't yet have a name for. And I have always trusted that moving was better than staying still, even when I couldn't explain why.

Moving to Europe is not the beginning of that story. It is simply the latest chapter of one that started a long time ago, on a farm in Minnesota, with a girl who asked too many questions and felt othered by almost everything around her.

Where I Started

I was born in Portland. Raised on a small farm in rural Minnesota from the time I was six — chickens, pigs, goats, organic vegetables at a time when that word barely existed in rural Minnesota. Back to Oregon by middle school, settling in Bend, where I would spend my formative years.

I was left-handed, had an unusual name, lived on a farm, and asked too many questions. Kids bullied me. The religion my mother had embraced — she was a Jehovah's Witness — meant I sat alone in the library during holiday and birthday parties and never went trick-or-treating. I always felt othered. Like I was watching life through a window that everyone else had simply walked through without thinking about it.

My mother was a strong and complicated woman navigating her own considerable storms. She was eventually expelled from the church, and by middle school the religion chapter was closed, she was preoccupied with her own survival, and my sister and I were largely left to find our own way.

I was, in the most literal sense, raising myself.

Music and Friends and the Long Way Through

Music saved me before almost anything else did. I grew up on my mother and stepfather's record collection — Simon and Garfunkel, T. Rex, Pink Floyd, Hall and Oates. I absorbed it all. When Pink Floyd’s The Wall came out I was eleven or twelve, still in Minnesota, and I wanted to go to the movie so badly but wasn't allowed. The album went on repeat in my room instead. In high school, I had Comfortably Numb memorized word for word — every nuanced enunciation, sung with the depth of feeling that only a lonely scared kid can bring to a song like that.

I loved dancing. Had always loved it. No dance lessons — my mother didn't drive for years — so I made up my own dances in my bedroom to my favorite songs with the door closed. Hours of this, from early childhood through high school, until I could finally go to bars where local bands played and dance all night. I didn't even always drink when I was there. Sometimes I just wanted to dance, and I did.

I met Jenell my sophomore year of high school. We don't remember meeting — she was just suddenly there, and we were bonded in the way that certain teenage girls bond, the kind that has no name but feels like recognition. Two people who had the same unnamed longing, the same need for connection, moving through their teen years side by side in the way that teenagers do — parties, music, boys, bad decisions and good ones, all of it. Our friendship survived everything it went through and outlasted circumstances that ended it too soon. It was only when Kelly and I were in Arizona, years later, that we found each other again in the deep way — and she has been one of my closest people ever since. When she needed to move from Ohio to Arizona, Kelly and I flew to Dayton and drove the U-Haul back so she could drive her car. That is what lifetime friendships do. They show up.

After high school I was emotionally unprepared for conventional life. I attempted community college twice and dropped out both times before finishing the quarter. I wasn't ready and I knew it even if I couldn't say why. So instead I moved.

Bellingham, Washington. Bozeman, Montana. Yellowstone National Park, where I waited tables at the Old Faithful Lodge. Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Back to Bozeman again. I didn't have a car. Just my bike. I was twenty-one years old, moving through the world on instinct and momentum, listening to Ramble On and Rambling Man and telling myself that movement was who I was.

It was in Yellowstone that I met Krista — my cosmic soul sister. She was everything I was not. Comfortable in her own skin, bold, completely unafraid to say exactly what she was thinking or feeling at any given moment. Where I was uncertain and careful, she moved through rooms like someone who had already settled the question of her own worthiness. She went on to get her four-year degree and then her master's. She had two extraordinary daughters. She knew what she wanted and moved toward it directly.

We had the same wounds underneath. The same complicated mothers, the same difficult childhoods, the same things we were both reckoning with in our different ways. Some people come into your life and rearrange everything. Krista was one of those people. If you're lucky you get one or two of them in a lifetime — people you connect with on the deepest level and simply call friend for the rest of your life, regardless of time or distance or how many years pass between conversations.

The Door That Changed Everything

I had been working at a video store back in Bend when I won a gift certificate to a local shop called The Curiosity Shoppe — described simply as a commitment to conscious living. I still remember the first time I walked through that door. I was aware in real time that something significant was happening.

The store sold spiritual and meaningful music, books, jewelry, meditation and spiritually based items. It hosted touring singer-songwriters. It smelled like incense and possibility. For a girl who had been spiritually hungry her entire life but had only ever been offered answers that didn't satisfy, walking into that store was like being handed a key to a door I hadn't known existed but had been searching for my whole life.

I worked there off and on for eleven years, starting at nineteen. That place saved my life. Not dramatically, not all at once, but slowly and completely.

It was there I was first introduced to the books that would rewire me. The Seat of the Soul by Gary Zukav. Mutant Message Down Under — a single woman taking a risk, going on a walkabout, trusting the wilderness to hold her. And The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho, which became something I have never put down.

His philosophy has stayed with me through every chapter of my life: be open to signs from the universe, trust what you feel, release your assumptions about what things should look like, have faith, keep going. Even small people can do big things in their own lives.

It is not lost on me that The Alchemist begins in Spain.

During those years I also apprenticed with a local herbalist, took classes in astrology, healing, and clairvoyance. The women who taught me — the herbalist, the astrologer, the community that gathered at The Curiosity Shoppe — gave me a framework for understanding myself and the world that no classroom ever had. They met me where I was. They showed me what was possible.

The Girls in the Tents

At twenty-five I found what felt like my dream job — working with at-risk teenagers at a residential and wilderness program. I started as night staff, became the cook and backup wilderness guide, then field guide, head field guide, operations manager, mentor. Five years. No college degree. Just experience, hunger, and a willingness to devour every training I could find.

The first program was for girls. And yes — I knew. I was deeply aware of the parallels between those kids and the girl I had once been. I knew what they needed because I had needed it too. I knew what I wished someone had given me. So I gave it to them instead.

The most sacred moments were the mornings when a kid would emerge from their tent with a light in her eyes that hadn't been there the night before. At graduation, each kid completed a symbolic walk back to their parents — a five-mile hike. Those final moments undid everyone. Parents, staff, kids — all of us in tears. I was so honored to be part of that work. I still am.

Arizona and the Flash of Knowing

At thirty-three, after a loving relationship ended, I lay in bed the night we agreed to part ways and had a flash — sudden, absolute, certain. I said out loud into the dark: I'm moving to Arizona.

It was Cinco de Mayo. By September I had sold my house, my car, and almost everything I owned and moved to Tucson alone.

I transferred with my job at Wild Oats natural food store. Worked as a flight attendant at a private airline. Moved to Phoenix. Attended the Southwest Institute of Healing Arts — studying mind-body transformational psychology, polarity therapy, and nutrition. Managed a day spa. Became a professional organizer. Designed and sold custom closets, pantries and offices.

I was building something, even when I couldn't see the blueprint.

Years later another relationship ended and I moved back to Oregon. And then on an ordinary night at the Bend Brewfest, I met Kelly.

Three weeks later I knew. This was it. This was the person I had been becoming myself for.

Looking back now I can see the thread that runs through all of it — the farm in Minnesota, the library during holiday parties, Comfortably Numb on repeat in a dark bedroom, the bike instead of the car, Jenell and the invisible bond of shared longing, Krista and the mirror she held up, the gift certificate that opened a door I had been searching for, the girls emerging from their tents with new light in their eyes, the flash of knowing on Cinco de Mayo.

I have always followed an inner compass that others couldn't always see or understand. I have always trusted the flash of knowing over the voice of fear.

But if I am being completely honest — and this blog is nothing if not completely honest — the moving was not always courage. Sometimes it was running. Sometimes it was the only thing I knew how to do when staying felt too hard or too scary or too much like risking something I wasn't sure I deserved.

I wrote about that more fully in another post — the one about the campfire at nineteen, and the thought that arrived so quietly it almost didn't seem real. If you haven't read it, read that one next. It is the truth that runs underneath this one.

What I can tell you here is that the thread was always real, even when I couldn't see it. The searching was always genuine, even when it looked like wandering. And every single step of it — the long way, the winding way, the way that stopped making sense to outside observers a long time ago — every step of it led me here.

To Kelly. To Mollie and Samson. To this blog. To Spain. Maybe to France.

Moving to Europe is not a departure from who I am.

It is the most Lainie thing I have ever done.

Next — Kelly's story. A different kind of becoming, told with the same honesty.