by Shannon

Living a more nomadic lifestyle has allowed us to stay light, flexible, and adaptable.  It has challenged us to break old patterns and be creative in establishing new ones. if we’re not careful, however,  it can also leave us feeling ungrounded.  The temptation when traveling is to see as much as you can, but we’ve found that less is more. We visit few places and love them hard.  We settle in deeply and nest.  It feels essential to slow down, to create a sense of home when we don’t have our own house.  Here are some ways that have helped us turn a simple lodging into a home, whether we’re there for a week or a month: 

  • Unpack everything and stash your backpacks.   
  • Set up an altar. 
  • Rearrange the furniture. 
  • Hang things on the walls. 
  • Line your shoes up outside the door.   
  • Meet the neighbors.   
  • Buy fruit and veggies from the local market. 
  • Feed the street dogs and cats.  
  • Try to learn the local birds. 
  • Establish a slow rhythm that allows for homeschooling, exploring, playing, and being. 
  • When it’s time to go, pause.  Express gratitude. 

We try to always transition intentionally, knowing how important liminal spaces are for distilling, for learning, for growing.  We catch the bus or the boat, the van or the truck bed, the train or the plane.  We move on.  When we find the next spot, we settle in again.  

As we soon return to nest in Maine, we wonder how we can keep our rhythm slow. Slowness feels like a radical act of defiance against the modern world.  When we’re in places where the pace is downshifted we feel supported.  We appreciate that the mundane act of waiting an indefinite amount of time for a bus, rather than the convenience of a private car, offers us another experience of time. Space arises where we can nurture life and connection, to ourselves, to each other, and to the Earth. The paradigm shifts from moving through life to allowing life to move through us.  Another dimension opens where we step into a flow, into alignment.  This flow feels increasingly difficult to find in the U.S.  As we return to the place where I first nested in this life, our sincere hope is to establish a gentle current, to create plenty of space to be, and to continue to encounter moments of awe and wonder.