Hello from the other side

Navigating the internal turmoil of transformation

It’s the beginning of August but it feels like the end of September, the sun is warm on my face and the shade brings a chill. Leaves on the trees of the woods around me have already begun brightening towards yellows — the rich deep emeralds of summer have already bid farewell. And for the first time in four years, I am here, on land, tucked up into the sprawling countryside that abuts the Adirondack Park, living temporarily in the cabin built by my great-grandfather, far away from the boat that we’ve called home — that now sits in the Chesapeake Bay — and while the red winged blackbirds sing in the sun on their skinny maple swings, massive pieces of my self and identity are dying. And it feels good.

From March to June we pushed and sailed, taking every first window of benign weather on offer and traveling bit by bit, mile by mile, chugging along hastily as we departed the heavy Columbian heat of the tropics, crossed the expanse of the Caribbean Sea to the shores of Puerto Rico, wound our way through the long and shallow blue string of the windy Bahamas, and then rode the swift currents of the Gulf Stream north, into the hot and stormy coast of South Carolina.

Once we made landfall in America, three years after sailing out of it on the west coast, the next three weeks were spent working our way further north through the marshes and rivers of the Intracoastal Waterway, waking early, spending six to twelve hours a day underway, fighting currents, dodging shoals, radioing to draw bridge operators, and dropping anchor every night just before dinner. Every mile in felt a little like our life in the tropics was further away, while moving deeper into the strange familiarity of our home country. Tying the sailboat to the dock in Virginia felt like the exhausting validation of a vision cast one year earlier, when we were cruising the Pacific Costa Rican coast and decided we would take Viā to the U.S. — getting there before the next hurricane season — which is what we have now accomplished, over three thousand nautical miles later.

I haven’t been here, on the page or on my podcast for (many, many) months. Maybe you’ve noticed, maybe you haven’t. But all the while, I’ve been carrying a small but heavy pressure to appear here, and while much of my silence has been due to the utter consumption of the hustle to get our vessel across an enormous expanse of ocean and into a safe latitude and harbor against a running clock, there’s been a lurking undercurrent of resistance that I’m only just beginning to look in the face.

The re-entry into life on land has been filled with equal amounts novelty and challenge at every turn. Many things are the same: I still find myself rising and setting with the sun’s rhythm, we’re still cooking all our own meals as the nearest towns, twenty miles away, offer slim to no options, we don’t have a television or freezer space or a dishwasher or cell service or neighbors, and with nowhere else to go except into the woods for a walk, my little family of two dogs and my husband are all still together just about 24/7.

But most things are starkly different, from the small mundanities of learning to carry keys or pay a utility bill again, to the logistical ease of not needing to convert currency or overcome language barriers for basic transactions or errands, or even just the simple ability to flush a toilet with the single press of a handle or step on solid land with nothing but the opening of a door.

And some other things still are more subtle in their contrast, like adjusting to the somewhat terrifying speeds of car travel after moving at a walking pace for ten thousand miles, or the slow settling of my nervous system from knowing that after I return from town or wake from a night’s sleep, my home will still be exactly where I left it, or still feeling the instinct to jump to vigilance at the threat of an approaching storm when all that’s actually required is the lazy closing of a window at best — and otherwise no mind need be paid to the sky or swinging moods of the winds and weather. I still notice the vague tightening of scarcity when I use power or water, only to remember that these run limitlessly here, a well that never runs dry, and I have not yet stopped paying gratitude to water that always comes out of a tap hot, or feeling a bit overwhelmed by massive grocery stores with shelves stocked with anything you could ever want.

The challenges are ample, but the charms of land life are ample, too. Constellations of dragonflies buzz above the fields that shine back at the sun with bursting bounties of goldenrod; the screen door rushes in the sweet aroma of leaf and soil with every slam; the hum of the stream can be heard even inside by the fire; and the thought of being witness to an autumn for the first time in four years fills me with sparkling, uncontainable, childlike glee. Surrounding bits of stone walls and bedrock lend a weight to the encompassing sense of sturdiness here, a felt contrast after living so long in a buoyant, bobbing, swaying, heeling, and heaving home. Unlike the ocean, the view out my window stays constant — an unmoving forest sitting stoically to the west — but underneath the surface of its consistency, a deep transition has already begun.

As the sun soaked blackberries shrivel and shrink and the feathery stretches of ferns and grasses fade to crisp shades of auburn and rust, I find myself moving in tandem with the earth, sending my energy deep into my roots and letting a part of myself die. Many parts, perhaps. I can’t tell with certainty what precisely is disintegrating— maybe it’s a story of myself I’ve been holding for years, the one where I can’t appear on this page, I can’t speak or write or share unless my words are coated in the expert veneer of knowing and certainty. Maybe it’s bigger ideas about who I am, what I do, and what I want — the truth is that nearly all of my old self image and identity is wilting, fading, dropping away. But as pieces of myself (or pieces of my little ideas of myself, perhaps) lose the steady supply of sustenance they’ve been given and begin to turn to compost, I can simultaneously feel buds of new life already pushing up from the darkness.

Amid the countless changes to the simplest and the biggest components of my life and... everything in between, as I wind my way through the layers of adjustments and meet the many well-intentioned what’s next?’s with an honest but empty shrug, my days are mostly spent wandering aimlessly in the unknown, clouded by the hazy shades of doubt and confusion that cloak the wild woods of liminality. I’m here with my feet on solid ground surrounded by roots and rocks and the steadiness of land and mostly, I just feel disoriented, unsure, and completely bewildered.

But I’ve been here before, adrift in this long in-between (this newsletter was called lost & found not too long ago, after all). In fact, I don’t think I ever left — I’ve actually been here for quite a while. There’s something about selling everything you own, moving onto a sailboat, and learning how to sail while you live and travel in foreign seas for several years that will challenge your confidence, your choices, and your conviction every once in a while, especially when the business you built also seems to fade into the background while you figure the rest out. Feeling like a noob, a beginner, and frankly, sometimes, a total fucking catastrophe, is a regular event. It seems as though I’ve made a little home for myself in the strange nowhere land between chapters, far from where I was, but also definitely not yet wherever I’m going. I’ve been here for a good long time now. But there is something new about this awkward and uncomfortable space — for the first time ever, I’m happy to be here.

It’s now actually the beginning of September, a month after I began writing this. The hummingbirds have all left on their journeys south, the wild turkey poults that visit the fields are nearly full grown, and our counter is covered with the colors of the season’s final fruit from the large tomato plants in the garden. From here, I can see that the work that I did for so many years, both personally and professionally back before pushing off the sturdy shores of Seattle, was the work of constructing, healing, strengthening, refining, and overcoming— the work of accumulation, building into the full bloom of summer. And here on the other side of the continent and on the other side of walking away from a solid, secure life, with countless miles and storms in between, I can see that my work now is that of dissolving, deconstructing, rearranging, shedding, and decomposing — it is the work of subtraction, the necessary quiescence of autumn. And most importantly, I can see that in many ways, I’ve been stifling my own self-expression simply because what I want most to share doesn’t neatly map onto my old ideas of who I am.

So here I am: the life coach that doesn’t have any idea where she is in life, the advisor on building self-esteem who’s taken some massive blows to her self confidence recently, the one who helps people dismantle their limiting beliefs who has been blinded and bound by her own for some time, and the one who used to have the answers who is awash in nothing but questions — oh, and also the one who’s currently fumbling through the most basic pieces of life on land, like (re)learning to wear shoes all the time. And it actually feels good to say it. Though echos of fear do occasionally ring through these woods, and I can still find myself wrapped in the panic of endless questions, I know the renewal, the rebirth, the answers are finding their way to me through quiet whispers and subtle shimmers — but they can’t grow into booming clarity if the old hasn’t been sufficiently cleared out first.

So I’m learning from the earth and letting go of what needs to go — like the story that I need to be in a state of knowing in order to be of service or to share at all — and for the first time, I’m smiling in the face of the void instead of running from it, because it doesn’t feel threatening or scary. It feels liberating. This ground that I have found myself on is fertile, and there’s lightness available within the full surrender to the internal turmoil of transformation.

xo, Taylor

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P.S. Thank you for being here and reading my words — it feels so good to press ‘publish’ again. And a very, very special and heart felt thank you to my paying subscribers here, who patiently and kindly stayed with me through the last several silent months. And though I’m in no position to make any promises about what you can expect here moving forward (lol), it will surely be more honest, even if it is more confused — and I hope that should you find yourself in the midst of a transition or a full-on renegotiation of your life or self, that you find some slivers of solace in my words, and join me on this wild ride of starting anew, again.