Interior Design

For those of you who know me, you know that I passionately, and sometimes blindly, follow the tugs of my heart. A quick review of my previous life pursuits will reveal to you a woman who once wanted to be rapper (Yeah, that’s right. A rapper. I once shared a stage with

Too Short, AND I won the freestyle competition on the booze cruise during a college spring break---say whaaaaat?!), a travel writer, a yoga teacher, a slam poet, a permaculturist, a preschool owner, and most recently, the owner of a home staging and interior design business. I used to judge myself on my lack of follow-through, but as I’ve gotten older and a lot more self-aware, I’ve accepted the fact that I bore easily and I need to be constantly learning and changing in order to feel at home in my skin.

The two threads that weave through all of my various career endeavors are 1) creativity, and 2) awareness. I feel dead if I’m not creating and I feel shallow if I’m not connecting. I cannot lead an inauthentic life. I refuse. So, when and if something is no longer serving the tug of my intuition, I shed it like a snake skin and meander my way to the shiniest horizon.

A little backstory is needed here to give this blog post a spine and bring it to its logical head.

Josh and I moved to Maui shortly after we were married and landed on a permaculture farm for a farming internship. Our original intent was to raise our children abroad, but we didn’t have the money or jobs to do so at the time, so Hawaii seemed like a good compromise. We could live and eat for free, get second jobs, and save enough money to get us the rest of the way “there”.

Spoiler alert---it didn’t work out that way.

What the farm gave to us though, was a very clear vision for what Josh and I wanted for our lives. Permaculture showed us a tangible way of being in the world that was far less consumptive, and far more balanced than we had ever experienced previously. We loved the slow pace, the connection to our food, and the feeling that we were leaving the land better than we had found it. It was a definitive moment in our lives and we have been working ever since to secure our own piece of land and live out that dream.

So, it is not without some internal tension that I embark into the world of Interior Design. The building and design industry can be incredibly consumptive and unnecessarily wasteful and this creates a palpable friction with the leave-no-trace, tree-hugging, hippie I believe myself to be. But, as ready as we were to pursue permaculture, it became clear early on that Josh and I were not going to be able to afford to pay our student loans or tackle our debt by growing carrots. The carrot instead, dangles in a seemingly unreachable distance, and we march dutifully behind it.

The idea for this business started because I had a lot of friends over the years tell me I was good at design. Then I read “The Magnolia Story” by Joanna Gaines, and I was completely inspired. She took her eye for design and ran with it, maintained her authenticity, and went on to build one of the biggest home design empires to date. I said to myself, “I can do that.” And while I don’t expect to be on HGTV or roll out my own line of housewares at Target, I have complete faith in my eye and in my tenacity. This is not to say that I won’t get my teeth kicked in on the upward rise of the learning curve, but who needs all their teeth anyway?

So here I am, in this newly minted office. There are paint samples still on the wall. It is cluttered with pack-n-plays and excess home staging wares that won’t fit elsewhere in our house. There are fancy design catalogues, bills, and a warm cup of tea. The words come freely from my fingers but the blog is nudging me toward a thesis of some kind.

Let’s start from the someday farm and work backwards.

I don’t know where our farm will be. All I know is I want to be there with my family and my close friends, living a sustainable and fulfilling life that is paced far differently than the insanity that now fills my days. It is my intent to write and design my way to that farm.

I have always been a writer. It is one of the few things I have never abandoned. My words can carry me when my energy falters. They are life giving to me, and I believe that words are immeasurably powerful. In the beginning there was the word---right? So, by pouring my dream into the structure of language, my intent has a place to stabilize and take form. The intent is written, now I leave it to the cosmos and the strength of my will to fill in the details.

So why interior design then?

Well, I suppose I am intrigued by the possibility of “Interior” design. I think there is a place in this blog to highlight inner-work and all the nuance that goes into designing one’s own life. I am drawn to spaces that reflect our inner most essence and I would like to midwife those expressions into being for those less aesthetically geared.

So, in short, this is meant to be more than paint samples and fabric swaths (although we will talk about those too). It’s meant to be a place we can all come home together, to share the human experience and the myriad ways we all design our respective realities. I hope you will follow us on this journey. Until next time…..