Our Journey from Here to There

My husband and I originally staked claim to this blogspot URL with the intention of blogging about our transition from urban-dwellers to mountain folk. We had just bought a house perched on top of a hill and surrounded by the unparalleled beauty of the central New Mexico high desert. Infatuated with all the exciting adventures we had signed up for as we signed away our livelihood to a mortgage company, we wanted to share our experiences with our far away friends and family. However, having real-world adventures often precludes one from having lots of time to sit down and coherently record the details of those day-to-day happenings, so we opted for frequent sentence-or-two updates on Facebook and gave up on blogging before we even began.

We have been living in our lovely little home for a bit over a year now, and we’ve had many of the adventures we had anticipated and a few more that were unexpected. We have fluctuated between 2 and 5 dogs, 1 and 2 cats, 9 and 10 chickens. Harley has begun brewing beer. We’ve fretted over record snowfalls, firewood shortages, record cold, stifling heat, record dry conditions, watched Los Alamos narrowly escape burning to the ground, and praised the monsoon rains. We’ve learned the wonder and danger of having large predators as some of our closest neighbors and discovered the beauty of Piñon Jays, flowering cacti, and the enormous New Mexico night sky, so heavy with stars that it’s almost no surprise when a few seem to fall from their station each night.

As amazing as our surroundings have been, we have experienced incredible challenges during our time here as well. I have developed a health condition that has radically affected almost every aspect of my day-to-day life. In part as a result of my illness, I left my job, which means that we have less available income. We have decided to rise to the occasion and make some lifestyle changes to help us make ends meet. Here’s the surprising part—we have chosen lifestyle changes that actually improve rather than detract from our quality of life. We are learning, day by day, to change what we put on our bodies, in our bodies, in our home, and how we interact with the world around us. In so doing, we are saving money every day. All the while, we’re spending more time together and doing things that have a positive impact on our health, family, and the world around us.

In my mind, I have been working through these many changes, challenges, joys, and hardships for the last several months, and I really think blogging will help to make my thoughts more concrete and help me to define how my life has changed. If it won’t hurt and it might help, then why not give it a shot? I hope to share some of the challenges that have gotten my family and me to where we are now, and what we have learned along the way.