chapter six

where I've been and where we're headed

I’m sitting at my old dining table that’s just been shipped across the country after spending five years collecting dust in a California basement. It’s strange, having all these pieces from an old life here in a new one. It’s winter in southern Maine and I’m watching the snow softly fall in the backyard, sipping a homemade latte, in a little house we just bought in October, and I’m not quite sure how to feel. Content, unsettled, distracted, exhausted.

Life here is equal parts novel and nostalgic. It feels vaguely like the life we lived in Seattle and nothing like the one we lived aboard a forty foot sailboat, traveling by the wind for four years.

It’s January 2026, and even though we docked our home in the Chesapeake Bay for the final time in June of 2024, this transition back to a life on land is still here, active and unfolding. It wasn’t until last week that we unpacked and got to use our old glasses, instead of plastic boat-safe cups, and it still feels like a special treat to get to drink out of such fragile, breakable things in such a static and unmoving home. Our long, long journey back to ‘normal life’ continues.

You may (or many not) have noticed that I haven’t been writing to you for a while now. This moment here in my kitchen with my latte is deceptively quiet, but the truth is that the last many months have been anything but peaceful.

After moving in here in October, we dove right into the many projects this fixer-upper needed, DIYing as much as possible, and also hiring out a small renovation. Because of this, since early October, no box has been unpacked, work crews have been in and out every day, cardboard has covered the floor while paint has covered our clothes, skin, and hair, and drywall dust and tools have littered the whole house.

Has it been hectic and uncomfortable and stressful and frustrating and overwhelming? Yes. But we’ve needed to push through to get an awful lot done in a short amount of time because:

I am pregnant! Due in March.

In July, the test revealed what we had hoped to see: two parallel lines. My husband and I spent the next few days staring at each other in excited disbelief, eyes wide as saucers, big nervous smiles on our faces. It wasn’t too long after that first week that my body began to feel it. I mean really feel it. My weightlifting routine faded into the background as my lungs could barely take me up a flight of stairs. Unrelenting nausea crept into every waking moment of my day and night. Soul-deep fatigue had me feeling tired in ways I didn’t know were even possible (like even while I was sleeping???).

For the first three months, I was a mere shell of a human and could barely get out of bed, let alone forge an interesting thing to say to the world (or to my dogs). I slept and ate and worked and barfed. I zombied through life until I hit the blessed second trimester and finally started inhabiting my body again — just as we closed on the house and this whole circus began here.

So this, my friends, is where I’ve been, and why this newsletter (and the podcast!) has been collecting dust for so many, many months.

We’ve been awash in one massive change after the other, making it through the exciting but nerve wracking early stages of a pregnancy at 39 years old, shipping our remaining earthly possessions from one coast to the other, buying a home and managing eleventy hundred house projects simultaneously while living in a heap of tools, dust and boxes, trying to settle into our new neighborhood on land and life back in the terrifying upside down (aka today’s America), and oh — also preparing to be parents.

It’s been, like… a lot?

Somehow, Still Adrift

This whirlwind of change has brought competing desires to my door: the primal urge to nest and paint and fix and tidy—everything needed to ready my new home for new life—and the equally primal urge to quiet and still, to root into the physical experience of this pregnancy. In the hurried effort to get our home ready, I’ve found myself swept away by the former, far away from my body, lost at sea in the Make Believe.

I’ve spoken a bit around here about the difference between living in the Real World and the Make Believe world of humans — the latter consisting of concepts and abstractions and ideas that tend to wholly consume us and keep us in our minds (phones, work, traffic, news, money, status, etc). The Real World, by contrast, is made of the actual components of our life on earth that bring us down into the ancient animal of our bodies, the parts forged through billions of years of highly attuned evolution, the parts that still whisper wisdom to us if we remember to listen (the sun, the land, the changing seasons and weather, our senses, the other countless beings we are inherently bound to).

Life aboard a sailboat brought me into contact with the Real World and kept me there for years. Even the first few places we lived after returning to land helped me stay in this quietly connected place, and I cautiously made every effort to not lose sight of it as we became more entangled in the Make Believe.

Even still, my efforts to stay connected to my own Rewilding fell by the wayside in the wake of the chaos of the last six months.

The very things I vowed to hold onto just about slipped out of view entirely. I haven’t been prioritizing local relationships and communities (see above re: sleeping for 3 months straight). Quiet time to just be has yielded to nonstop work crews and power drills in my home every day. Getting to know my Place and ecosystem has consisted of merely waving hello to the mama and baby deer that visit our backyard every once in a while. Making room for play and creativity has been difficult (my hooping practice nosedived when I grew this big belly, time to write has seemed to vanish into thin air). And the premise of slow living seems distant as ever as we push against a March deadline to get as much done as possible these days.

There’s a deep centerlessness that this has created within me, an ungroundedness from rushing from one thing to the next, of perpetually looking ahead, of spending more time in the admin of my mind than the pulse in my veins.

In these last months, the Real World around me somehow turned to autumn and deepened itself into winter, the calendar has reset and days are already getting longer, and all of it has carried on in the background with no substantial attentive presence from me. It’s snowing today, it’s the end of January of 2026, and all I keep thinking is, Where have I been? And how did this all happen already?

Luckily, as I write this, the dust has finally begun to settle — literally and figuratively. The work crews have left, boxes I packed up five years ago in Seattle are slowly and joyfully getting unpacked, the to-do list has shrunk way down, the house has started to really feel like our home, and gratitude for it all has begun to overtake the overwhelm. The enormous task of finding and making a comfortable and safe place for us all to live for a while has mostly been accomplished, just in the knick of time.

As I sip my tea while the snow coats the evergreens and the deer take shelter under the boughs, I finally point my full attention to the bumps and stretches of the little creature swirling and twirling inside my body — and I can feel the Real World eagerly welcoming me back to what matters most.

The New Road is an Old Friend

Some time ago, while my husband and I were lightheartedly discussing the many, many lives we’d lived in our eighteen years together, we gave each era a chapter number.

Most of these chapters involved a geographical move, or a starting over — like when we moved to Lake Tahoe, or to upstate New York, or to Seattle, or onto a sailboat — and we decided that in the book of us, as we once again enter into new unknown terrain, we are now turning the page to Chapter Six.

Just as our adjustment to land is beginning to stabilize, we’re jumping off into another wild adventure. I still don’t know exactly where I am or where I’m going but I do know one thing: I want to be fully and wholeheartedly here for all of it.

Chapter Six.

Here we go.

xo,

Taylor

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It feels so good (albeit a bit rusty!) to be writing here again to you — and to be honest I wonder if anyone is even reading this since it’s been so long! If you made it this far, I’d love to hear from you.

Drop me a note in the comments and let me know how you’ve been!

Has life been humbling you too, lately?

Are you also pregnant or preparing for some sort of big new chapter or life change? How has it been going for you so far?