Back at the blog for the first time since starting my new job. I’m rusty but this feels like coming home. If you’ve been following along, I pivoted Wildlifeel at Home from a proper design studio to a simple blog, and decided to look for a 9-5. For numerous reasons, I wanted to release Wildlifeel at Home from the pressure to earn, and I wanted to take the opportunity to return this place to it’s roots: a place to share as I’m learning, and to help wildlife within the concept of home design and construction. So, it’s a beautiful simple blog! It can now remain pure to it’s core and only blossom into what it wants to be – in time.
Not only have I started a new job that allows this, it’s also with a sustainable company within the design industry. And what they offer actually allows trees to remain standing. For someone who is driven to find alternatives to virgin wood, I feel incredibly lucky to be doing what I do during my weeks.
Now that 40hrs/wk are accounted for, I’m needing to rework my schedule for this blog. And learn how to do it, really. My experience has always been in writing to support my design work. Now, we’ve stripped it down to the essentials. I’ll be focusing on what I envisioned when I started this: study the impact and ripple effect(s) of specific home design and construction decisions, connect the dots between them and wildlife (both their wellbeing and their homes). I figure 1-3 micro steps every weeknight (research, references, outlines, points to make), writing and phtography on Saturday, Sunday for social posts.
It’s an exciting time, really. There’s a sense of calm and focus about Wildlifeel now. I feel like I can allow myself to fall in love with the learning, the writing in a way I was trying to rush through before. There’s a great alignment now between work and life – and other work. There’s a sense of this new chapter, like I can finally enjoy my day-to-day now.
My 9-5 is remote, quiet, demands precision and expertise, depth. It’s perfect for my personality, my energy levels, my lifestyle – in this little off-grid rough-in cabin on raw acreage with my chickens. Seems my earliest meetings may be at 11am or so, late enough that the wood stove has finally taken the sting out of the air so I can bring more of me. And that’s just in one way this is so delightful of a match. I really do feel lucky. It feels like I have the best of both worlds, easily. I’m grateful.
I’m also able to begin caring for my health better, too. There’s capacity for mindfulness again. That paired with turning towards Wildlifeel as my biggest passion project – it’s all so dreamy. I think I may have dreamt this, truly.
I’m here to share, to document, that my desk is set up for this new way of life. The right books in the right places. The right post-it notes with the right reminders. Balance is building underneath it all, I can feel it.
And though there has been some personal chaos for my family and I, which had us questioning a whole lot, I think I’m going to come out the other side with more understanding about what life really is – or can be – which is simple. ..Yep, that’s it: just simple. If we allow it to be.
I think there’s so much distraction from the truth of this world, so much noise and flash. But when we are confronted with what’s real and true – it’s like finally being able to see well after someone quickly flipped the light switch in a room thats been pitch black for years. Ya know? So I’ve been sitting in that for a few days..
Life to me know feels steady. Like I know what I’m doing, or at least where I’m going which is actionable enough. There’s both a steady presence I’m finally ok with and ambitions that I love and the road I love, too.
Isn’t it something that we can call ourselves writers simply because we write? Photographers because we take photographs? Artists, deep thinkers… we can take pride in knowing we are simply because we have chosen it, and are doing it. And if we like the day to day of what it is we choose to do, well then we can trust good things to come of them. Right?
I don’t know where this website will go, but my goodness do I crave to be with it always. This place can do good, already is doing good, for wildlife. This place is also an outlet, an expression, therapeutic, meditative, it ties me to almost every old hobby I loved when I was young – just wrapped into one. How could one not be comforted by building something that allows for that to be true?
Yes, there will be a big shift in writing style, topics a bit, how I relay info, the pace, the organization. I don’t even know how. But, I’m going to do what comes naturally there. No force, no sophistication where raw serves it better. With this effort, I’ll find my unique way. I’ll find what Wildlifeel at Home is meant to be.
If you’ve been here for years, thank you. If you’ve just found me, so glad you’re here.
