So you want to live in a yurt on a goat farm do you?

At 4:30 AM on August 10th I will load my fur children, Baker and Louie into a ten foot Uhaul truck with my sweet little Mazda 3 towing behind, and pull out of the driveway I’ve called home for the last four and a half years. The longest I’ve lived somewhere since my childhood home.

My feelings and emotions are all over the place, rhythmically dancing in my body like two salsa dancers hanging on to each other for dear life. Although this move has been in the making for about a year now, my hope is that instead of my normal creep off in the middle of the night fashion, I close this chapter properly.

My time in Encinitas has been one full of incredible healing and great self discovery.

Moving down here on the heels of a painful divorce, I thought my life would be easy. I thought that I’d be laying out at the beach every day as I eased into my new life with power and grace. How little I knew about grief back then.

But that is a story for another time. This is a story about how I will be moving to a goat farm and living in a yurt in Northern California.

It’s no wonder that I’m being called back to a slower way of life. I’ve heard the quiet whispers for quite some time now but they started to get much louder last January as I was being hit right and left with massive and debilitating panic attacks and eventually was diagnosed with PTST.

It was time to slow down. It was time to get back to a way of life that felt most like me.

True to all my divine interventions, all I could do was set the intention and wait for the next step to present itself because if I’ve learned anything over the last four and a half years, the more I fight something, the more I force it — the more I repel it away.

Back in May while on a trip up to Seattle to see my mom this yearn to move somewhere back north took an unshakable hold of me. So much so that if it wasn’t for the fact that my beloved pets were back in Encinitas and I was scheduled to drive up to Berkeley to pick up my dear friend the following week to stay with me for a few months, I don’t think I would have gotten on my return flight.

A cocktail of thoughts and emotions swirled in my body as I sat with my mom as she was administered chemotherapy. Time was fleeting and I longed to be closer to my family and live a life that felt more authentic to my soul. Other then the house I lived in, I wasn’t happy in Encinitas. My life had come to a standstill and everything just felt hard.

Living in Southern California, I learned rather quickly that I wasn’t a beach person. Growing up I watched 90210 and had dreams of being steps away from the beach so that I could bronze my body as my golden blonde locks flowed down my back. In reality, the dream far superseded the reality. I’m a land and seasons girl. I’m a lake and rivers girl. And I’m a gal that prefers to tromp around without having to constantly lookout for rattlesnakes. This very fact alone was top on my list as reasons to get back up north.

As I watched the dark brown poison drip down the plastic tube into the port placed in my mom’s chest I realized it was time. Time to let go of the fear and say yes to a life that feels more like me.

Last September on a road trip with my mom up the coast of California I found myself feeling at home as we drove the winding roads of the North Coast but one area in particular made my soul feel alive.

A half hour north of San Fransisco resides the city of Petaluma. A smaller city but big enough to hold a Whole Foods, my defining attribute of what makes a city a true “city.” My mom and I rented a converted barn into an Airbnb for my birthday on a 10-acre ranch inhabited by over 70 farm animals including a Zebra. In all honesty, this Airbnb had me at “rescued Zebra.”

As we drove the winding roads south on Highway 1 from Mend0cino to Petaluma, I felt that quiet voice in the back of my mind begin to stir. The same voice that told me to move to Encinitas and the same one that told me to to buy a saw. We were entering familiar territory where I once again felt like I could breathe. I felt myself grow excited with possibility as I turned to my mom and said, “Mom, I think I found my new home.”

And in that moment, like so many other times before, I planted a seed that would eventually bloom.

How I found this property is a story of serendipity and just how the Universe works and one I’m going to share on my Podcast soon.

I’ve always had a mild fascination with off-grid-living. Vanlife, tiny homes, a small one bedroom cabin deep in the woods — all these existences fill the feed of my Instagram and I felt a calling to live in a similar fashion for quite some time.

My biggest hang up has been that I really love my finer creature comforts in life like waking up in the middle of the night and having a bathroom with the porcelain thrown staring back at me only a mere ten feet away from my bedroom.

My current home in Encinitas is beautiful. It has everything I need (including a bathroom IN the house) and walls that divide the home into quiet individual rooms to find reprieve from the various noises of life. Yet something inside of me tells me I can’t stay somewhere any longer out of comfort. I’m a risk taker. I’m a follower of the whispers of my heart. I was never meant to live a ‘normal’ life. I know that much.

If I’m honest though, I don’t know how I’m going to feel living in what is essentially like a giant studio apartment sans a bathroom. The walls around me feel protective.

I wonder if I am going to love it or loath it.

How will I feel about waking up in the middle of the night and having to walk outside to use the restroom? How am I going to feel waking up in the morning and not be comforted by the walls of my bedroom but rather facing my whole life in one room?

How will I feel being so far out from others? Will I really afford myself the space and time to slow down and continue to heal or will I busy my time with mindless numbing and longing for a life I used to have?

I don’t have the answers to these questions. Not yet anyway. But I’m ready to explore what this new life really means to me. A simple life. I’m ready to see what I can live with and live without and all I know is that something is pulling me up there. Something opened up a reality I never knew existed a few short weeks ago and something is brewing, waiting to be born there.

Mostly, I know that something has to change because the hustle and “work hard to play harder” mentality just doesn’t work for me. My nervous system is shot. The last several years have broken me down to my core and forced me to face my demons and get honest about who I am and what I want.

So no, I don’t know if Yurt Life will be for me but I’m really excited to try.

And at the end of the day, waking up to this view isn’t going to be all that bad either.