It's bittersweet to leave

Parting is never goodbye...

When I moved to Steamboat in 1998, I was fresh off a decompressing two months at Eckerd College, from which I graduated in 1995. In those 3 years I had spent two in Oregon studying all topics of natural living, and one in Scotland taking a long-needed and appreciation-building "gap year."

After 3 years of rain, I was mostly looking for sunshine when I rolled into Colorado, but I was also looking for community, for small town living, and for deep friendships.

I got all that in spades over the next two and a half decades. I met my future husband, traveled the world, tried my hand at several careers, and always felt blessed to come home to this historic and quaint hamlet of a town. Winters are sweet (albeit LONG), and summers are sweeter (albeit now quite smoky). But a LOT has changed in 25 years, and so do your priorities.

Yet once again, it seems I am pivoting for the same two reasons I always have — the great outdoors and the weather it provides. 

What we are establishing in Tennessee is all together exciting, scary, short-term, and long-term. I'll unpack that a little more next week. But suffice it to say, it's bittersweet to leave here.

The friendships I've made, the work I've done, the community I've been a part of, the memories I've made—both individually and together with Craig—make up who I am, and will always come with me. But the emotions are at the surface as we wind down to the final days as residents of Colorado, and as we close one door, another opens.

I know we'll see all the people we love and adore again, and I hope that our new hamlet of Shambhala will draw them to us.

The lesson? Feel the feels, appreciate the lessons, and keep manifesting the life you want to live until it looks like the legacy you want to leave.