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Allow me to (re)introduce myself as I return to a new life, again

One month ago we moved into our own house — a little cottage on the coast of southern Maine that we’re renting through the winter — and with this move it feels as though this wild year has finally settled itself. And being that it’s now… December, it seems ridiculous to say that, but it feels deeply true nonetheless.

We rung in the new year living in a remote archipelago of Panama in our floating home, and have been sailing and moving pretty nonstop since then to get here, from there. And though we have been back on dry land since the summertime, those first months felt more like a suspended and disorienting state of extreme transition than a completed life shift — which is all just to say that now, one month after moving into this little house, this place we can call our own, this place where, for the first time in four years, our next move of any sort is a distant months and months away, this place where the slowness of winter is settling in all around us, it feels like we have finally completed our move from a nomadic life at sea back to a life on land in America.

And it feels like only now, as the dust has begun to settle, that I am beginning to make out the distinct ways the currents and winds of the previous four years have reshaped and rearranged who I am, and the ways that that experience has given me fresh lenses with which I view my life and the world I now live in. And while most of these forces and their changes are too large to contain in a tidy “5 Lessons I Learned from Living at Sea” kind of post, there’s a couple things I feel called to share with you today in the hopes that they speak to you on a soul level.

I have started over a lot, but this time, it’s both much harder (at an age when most of my peers are well settled into the comforts of decades of cumulative community and career efforts, among other things), but it’s also way more interesting and more intentional. This time, I am a whole lot clearer on how I want this life to move, to feel, to be, than I ever have been before — and I’m looking for some pals who might resonate with these pieces.

in the San Blas islands of Panama

First, I think it’s helpful to share that learning how to sail while sailing in the boat we moved into, having never before sailed a vessel of that caliber was, maybe unsurprisingly, punishingly overwhelming a lot of the time. There were countless moments where I could feel my whole self esteem collapse inward into some sinkhole I didn’t even know was there until it swallowed me up whole.

I didn’t realize how comfortable I’d become in my life back in Seattle. Yes, it was one I worked extremely hard to build, but once the momentum reached a certain point I rode the inertia, becoming so familiar with the major pieces of my days that I mostly slid through frictionlessly. This is not to say that I didn’t have plenty of devastatingly hard days as I had *checks notes* A LOT, but it means that it wasn’t until I threw myself into living on a 40 foot sailboat that I realized how little I had actually been challenging myself before.

And once I was suddenly in a place where ev. er. y. thing. was new (EVERYTHING — from how to flush the toilet or take a shower, to how to go for a walk or buy food or make a meal, to how to literally just get from point a to point b), well, I kind of sucked at all of it. And struggling with just about everything one does in an average day, day after day, month after month, as it turns out, can cut one’s confidence down at the knees. And it did just that — I distinctly remember many (many) moments in the first year or two where I would throw my hands up in a state of frustrated dejection and cry, thinking good lord I am not good at ANYTHING in my life right now and WOW it mostly feels wretchedly awful. But here’s the thing.

It’s becoming clear to me just how much the intensity of that experience raised my threshold for, well, everything, but mostly: learning. Because yes I am “back”, back to a land-based lifestyle, but being “back” implies a return to a familiarity that I don’t actually feel through and through. The truth is that just about everything in my life is once again new, even here: we’re a new town in a new state where we don’t know anyone except for my immediate family, and even fully returning to my work is new, as I’ve never attempted this without social media before. The truth is it feels like I may as well have been living on Jupiter for the last four years, and just got plunked back down on earth (good luck with everything!). Community and friendships, work and career, rhythms and routines, activities and hobbies: it’s all new.

But all this novelty has done two important things.

First, I’m ok to suck at something now. At lots of things, even. All at once! It’s fine. It doesn’t feel like a personal failing. In fact, it kinda feels like if I’m NOT sucking at at least one thing in my life, that means I’m not trying at anything either — and I’m very much interested in trying.

Next, novelty is really helpful to illuminate the previously unnoticed habituations that embed themselves into the deep grooves of our lives. Even though we decided to move aboard a boat and travel the world because we wanted to shake off the layers of routine and ease that had quietly made themselves into the scaffolding of our life, I still didn’t realize how habituated I had become to all of it until every corner of my environment was new and I struggled to do anything/everything.

In the same way, returning to land has highlighted the pieces of a life at sea that I eventually became accustomed to out there, the pieces that were profound and special and grounding, the pieces that were just a given in that lifestyle — and it’s shown me just how easy it is to not connect with any of it here in People World.

Because that’s been one of the most notable pieces about returning to life on land: how little of it actually takes places in the real world. Days can get entirely consumed in the tangle of inner workings of human-invented concepts and shared beliefs: the internet, rules, laws, social media, money, markets and so on — many very important and beneficial aspects of a functioning society to be sure, things that require our attention and action and involvement, but also things that do not exist outside of the human mind in a real way. And I think one of the many costs of this is the way it keeps us up in our thinking minds, rarely dropping down into the depths of our sensing bodies.

Life at sea is one lived in constant close contact with the real world, the earth: storms and currents and whales and reefs and wind and people and shorelines. I used to feel the wind on my face 24/7, literally: most of my time was spent outside but even when inside, overhead hatches kept the ocean air rushing in at all hours of the day and night. There’s something that I can feel drifting away now that I’m mostly indoors and the real world need not carry any influence on my day at all, if I choose. The elements were what kept me stimulated — sometimes too much and it became draining — but now not having the feeling of the wind on my face or a storm on the horizon has left a bit of a void that I notice tries to be filled now, through my phone. (More on this soon)

I’ve been paying close attention to this. Thanks to all this (goddamn!) novelty, I’m watching these urges and unconscious patterns happen with an awareness that I didn’t have before. And I’m wondering if this diminishment of the real world and our hyper involvement in the artificial and human-made (and the subsequent way it keeps us up in our heads) is part of the emptiness, meaninglessness or hollowness that it seems so many people are sensing these days — living lives entirely entrenched in the world of pretend. I’m sensing how much we as a culture are desperately craving a connection with something felt, something raw, something real. I know I am.

a neighbor at my new home in Maine

And I suppose this brings me to the heart of what I wanted to share with you today.

That amid all the learning and beginning that I’m taking on as I work to essentially build a life from scratch, I’m also trying really hard to build it and live in a way that feels true to me right now. Something honest and soulful and intentional and wild.

I was an “expert” in my old life in Seattle: both in the sense that I just got good at doing the things I did everyday, as we all do, but also in a professional sense. I built a business on being an authority of sorts, and there’s something about that stance in this new era of work that I am reluctant to step back into. The last four years I have been the newbie, the person furthest from The Expert, and though I of course learned a TON and began to fully understand some pieces here and there, there’s something about positioning myself as an expert of any kind right now that reeks of Instagram culture — trying to live up to an image of who I think I’m supposed to be, being pigeonholed in a specific niche that I dare not step out of, always mining my life for lessons and wisdom and Instagramable takeaways — the very sort of pretend world that I am just simply not interested in spending much time in anymore.

I’m back in People World but I’m carrying the teachings of the Real World within me. I’m moving slower, growing hobbies and making ample time for play, I’m feeling my way through the next phase of my work, I’m exploring the local organizations and groups I want to be a part of, I’m considering my relationship to place in long-term ways that go deep instead of wide and shallow, I’m staying in touch with the more-than-human world by getting to know all the lives that surround our little house: the hemlocks and blue jays, the moths and falcons, the marshes and cardinals, the ocean and oaks and owls, and the gravelly earth underneath them all.

I’m new here, and I want both my personal life and professional life that I share with you here in my newsletter and on my podcast to feel more grounded, connected, and, soulful. While surely I intend to teach again, to host workshops, to hold space for conversations and deep dives, to coach again (man ALIVE I’ve missed that!), I don’t want to be the person who has it all figured out and who can’t falter or be seen trying or learning or failing — I want to be a multitudes-containing human who is walking this road alongside you in this absolutely heartbreaking and beautiful and sometimes downright bonkers of a world we live in together, sharing experiences and ideas as I go.

I’m new here, and I’m hoping to build something here — to build it with you, with your partnership and participation — a little community of people who are interested in some of these same notions: To live again in the real world, to enrich our lives not through polishing, perfecting, and mastering or dominating, but through returning, connecting and deepening — within our own beings, between one another, and with this mystery that we’re all alive in. To re-wild ourselves.

If you wanna be friends and come along for this lil adventure, please oh please drop a note and introduce yourself and say hi — I truly would LOVE to meet and get to know you.

And if you’re a past student of mine (HIIII!!!) drop a note and tell me what you are up to these days! You have NO IDEA how much it means to me and the size of the smile it puts on my face when I hear from you guys.

Thank you for being here, and I can’t wait to see the beautiful new place we create here, together.

xo,

Taylor

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