The Next Grand Adventure
The following is something I wrote in early August of this year. You will find an update at the end. It is a story I have been yearning to tell for over 6 months and it is finally time…
I have been sitting on a secret.
One that has been running in circles inside of me, cycling and churning like an eddy and I know I appear placid on the surface but internally, I could not be further from quiet. It is the eleventh of August and this story has been unfolding inside of me, and inside our little family since April.
We are moving.
The realization of this all came crashing down on us in an instant this past spring. I have always had a talent for knowing immediately when something is dead in the water and it is time to move onto a new chapter. It was no longer avoidable, I could see that our time in this home had come to a close.
On our slice of the Stewart River, July 2021
Endings are never simple. This one has felt especially heartbreaking and complex because this home that we have lived in for the past five years has been so much more than a house. We moved here to Two Harbors from the Twin Cities in July of 2021, it was our dream to be on the North Shore, to live on ten heavenly acres with the Stewart River running through the western edge of it. The start of our great big adventure living somewhere that fed and fulfilled us. This house has been a sanctuary that has cradled me through healing deep and painful trauma, it has been the space that held me as I built and grew both my artistic and homeopathic practices, and the land here has expanded me into a deeper knowing of self and an understanding of my own individual thread in the tapestry of life. Two months after we moved here, Spencer and I brought Rudder home as our first “kid” together. He has had these ten acres (plus a few on the neighboring land — sorry, Lyle and Luann) to romp and roam and call his own. Spencer expanded his consulting business from the spare bedroom upstairs, this place became somewhere to dream up Dark Star Cabins and birth her into the world. We have gotten to live in a place we could be close to our favorite playground, the BWCAW. We farmed, we have hiked, we’ve splashed and bathed in the river, grieved there, dreamed there, we have fallen in love with the flora and fauna that cycle through each season. We know them by heart. We have watched a small forest of white pines grow from Christmas tree-sized to nearly twenty feet tall. I found myself here at 32 and now at 37 I can say this place has healed me and grown me. When I look back at the young woman I was when I arrived here, both fresh and broken, I can see how much I’ve aged. I don’t mean I think I’m old, I know I’m not, but I am grown and I am stronger and more self aware, I finally feel at home in my body after years of wishing to leave it. This little old farmhouse and her ten acres gave me a safe place to expand into myself, and to finally become free.
So yes, the decision to leave has not been an easy one, but it has been obvious. You see we do not own this home or this land. We have been renting for over five years. Something that we honestly haven’t seen any problem with until the past few months. Without getting into the details, I will say this, sometimes your body just knows when a relationship has run its course. When the parameters become confining, when a situation that should be peaceful suddenly isn’t at all, it is simply time to move somewhere that feels like it can hold us a little better while we grow into truer and even more aligned versions of ourselves.
The thing is, we were not ready to move, and especially not this fast. Neither of us wanted to rent again, so we called our realtor and started hunting for properties in the area. We doomscrolled Zillow like it was a social media app. After a few short weeks of memorizing the for sale properties in the area, we found one that seemed near perfect and we put in an offer. And then, just as fast as it came into our lives, this new possibility left. We took a step back, realized we were getting in over our heads and that we didn’t want to commit to something unless it checked every single box. So, we rescinded our offer and a quick month after the search began, we found ourselves right back where we started.
One sunny morning at the beginning of July I was sitting in my usual spot on the futon in our three-season porch — my summer studio. I was staring north at the driveway, thinking about how close we had come to moving. As I was gazing out front, my eyes landed on our empty Mercedes Sprinter that Spencer bought two years ago. We have always planned to convert it for travel, but needed a garage that was tall enough and heated so we could work on it during the colder months since our summers were always so booked up. After much searching, one never revealed itself. Then last July we bought our sweet little cabin on 20 acres. A haven that became our brand new vacation rental, Spencer’s latent dream come true, one we now share together. Shortly after the cabin was ours, our few warm months of 2025 were spent getting the place ready for guests in the fall while simultaneously cramming in the last art fairs of the season. The van served in these times as a moving vehicle for furniture for the cabin or moving the brush trimmer, lawn mowers, doing all the things the trusty ol’ Jeep wasn’t outfitted to do.
As I sat there staring at the van and pondering the cabin just north of us, I heard a whisper, “that’s your ticket.”
my guys, at our cabin Jan. 2026
The thing is, I have known this. I think Spencer has too. Two years ago when he drove the van home from the cities, I impulsively blurted out “that thing might come in handy if anything abrupt ever happens and we have to move out of here in a pinch.” And just this past winter, when we spent a weekend at Polaris between bookings, Spencer spontaneously looked at me over our morning coffee and pondered, “what if we end up living here at one point?” Somewhere in our subconscious spaces we both knew these two dreams might come together to create a new home, we just had no idea how or when.
So the planning began. The thick of summer was churning with internal movement. Late night talks on the porch about storage, what furniture we’re going to get rid of, budgeting out the van build, figuring out how to outfit the cabin for more solar power, how we’re going to get water because the cabin doesn’t have a well, how we’ll shower, how we’ll keep Rudder on a raw diet without a deep freezer, how I might have a studio there. I barely painted, I felt physically frozen. My brain was so busy thinking about how much our lives were going to change, my body buzzing with the anticipation of a new challenge, an adventure, all the while I grieved the land and the little farmhouse I have fallen so madly in love with for the past five years.
It is now August 11th and here I sit at my workbench gazing at our untended garden. The goldenrod is starting to pop. The raspberries hang loose on their prickly branches and are now falling overripe for the ground squirrels and red squirrels and sparrows and finches that live here. The fireweed has nearly bloomed up to its tippy top. It is undeniably the end of the summer, the sun rising lower and redder each morning. Halloween will officially be our last day in this house. We have purged, packed and organized absolutely nothing as Spencer and I both know we’ll get it all done when we need to. I haven’t had the energy to straighten up or clean I think because I know my time here is coming to an end — it’s also summer in an old farmhouse and there is grass being tracked in by the dog twenty plus times a day and pollen creeping in through the permanently opened windows. It has been a fast summer. Hot, burning, and mentally busy. Emotionally, like an imminent death, the last exhale, a great liminal pause before a new beginning.
I have watered the river with tears and wept by my favorite Mama Cedar tree more times than I can count. With our favorite wilderness playground on fire so near us, I am more aware than ever that life can change in an instant. Nothing is guaranteed. Some days I am ecstatic with the anticipation of a new frontier for our little family. On others I am absolutely terrified because I know how much the entire landscape of my life is about to change.
The comfort is that I have been through enough change in my life to know that though I may be a tender being, I am also gritty enough to adapt. I have backpacked and paddled and camped through enough of the wilderness to know that I am made of all of the might needed to live a life closer to the land that I even am now. I know that actually, a change like this might expand me and launch me into a version of myself that I have longed to meet. There is an ancient, rooted part of me that knows I was meant to do this. That I’ll get to witness my wonderful partner feeling more free than he has ever been, that Rudder might absolutely adore this new life at our cabin and on the road with his Mama and Daddy. I know that we are about to start the grandest adventure of our lives through a great release of our expectations and an allowing for the cosmos to fill in all the big open mysterious spaces ahead with miracles and the types of challenges that make us feel astonished to be alive and more deeply integrated into this big wide world. I know that because we find ourselves in this very place, that we must be ready for whatever lies ahead.
An update…
The former was written in early August and it is now early October. The raspberries have been replaced by the greatest crop of apples we’ve ever enjoyed at the farmhouse, and the fireweed has long since gone to seed. In their place are blazing maples and sumac, the birches and the poplars are turning gold. The pines doing their great shedding of amber needles. The finches have long gone while the sparrows, chickadees, and jays remain. Certainly, things have changed a bit since I originally wrote this emotional update. A dear friend of mine told me recently “You make a plan so that you have something to deviate from.” Honestly, I could not relate to anything more, especially now — thank you, Abby Dare, for your wisdom.
Our original plan was to keep the cabin business open for the year and just stay there in between bookings. But since we are already changing so much, we made the decision to close up Polaris from November 2026 through April 2027 and reopen for bookings when the North Shore starts to come alive again. It was a hard decision to make since Polaris’s momentum has been building, and we want guests to be able to enjoy this place in the winter, but we need a home base to sink some roots into for now. We also know this is not our forever plan, just the one we need to lean on for the next six months.
a new adventure begins, Nov. 2026
Which means yes, we are moving to our cabin! Throughout this month we will be continuing the process of packing up our lives, we have already eliminated a massive amount of stuff — I am sure some of you are more than familiar with how much one can accumulate over the course of just a few years. I am eyeballs deep in going through art supplies, old journals, paintings, deciding what makes the cut. Spencer has been clearing out the basement, the garage, the garden sheds and vigilantly planning where everything will live. I have cleared out at least half of my clothes for donations. And yes, don’t worry, there are plans for a studio… more about that later. I will be updating you all via my newsletter as things progress. Honestly, it feels like such a relief to finally share this with you. I feel like I have kept my lips zipped for too long when there was so much unfolding.
If you’ve come this far, thank you so much for reading, for being a part of this journey, for investing in my little corner of the world. I am really excited to continue storytelling through this new chapter of our lives and everything we discover along the way.