Hittin' the road...

Early February, on the New Mexico / Arizona border.

It’s been three years since Chris and I left Crestone for more than a few weeks. On February 1st, we left for three months.

After spending the better part of 2019-2022 traveling, we settled in Crestone in late 2022 as road weary travelers. We quickly and unexpectedly bought a little house, which we then renovated into a not-so-little house over the past three years.

While Chris managed the build, I dived head first into working locally — taking leadership roles in two local organizations, gardening, writing for the paper, and doing whatever I could to walk the talk of supporting small-scale, interdependent community.

I spent most of my twenties pursuing external validation, success, and notoriety. Ultimately, I found myself so far off my path that I hardly recognized who I was when I looked in the mirror. At 28, I walked away from my career and my marriage, moved to a different city where I restructured my entire life so that the person I was on the outside better reflected who I knew I was on the inside.

I no longer cared about money, fame, or success. I traded online followers for actual friends, and ditched theory in favor of practice. I prioritized living my ideals, rather than simply talking about them. I stopped valuing digital communities, and started to see community as a group of people who shared the same land.

As the internal validation grew, the need for external validation not only dissipated, but started to feel repulsive. I stopped admiring people with fancy accolades, preferring those who lived simple lives, tended to the land, and helped their neighbors.

I gave up dreams of becoming a bestselling author or a well-known podcaster, and decided that all I wanted to be when I grew up was an old lady with a garden.

In many ways, I’m grateful to have made these changes. They helped me feel more grounded and sincere. Working on smaller projects with smaller goals helped me to feel accomplished and valuable in ways I never had before. I learned what it meant and what it felt like to live according to my values, and to apply my philosophies in ways that felt meaningful and reassuring.

And yet…

Every time I left Crestone, even for a few days, I was reminded of something that didn’t quite sit right. An inner voice would appear that asked a confronting question: “Why are you taking yourself so seriously?”

My relentless dedication to living a simpler, more authentic life, in addition to bringing meaning and value, brought with it a burden.

As much as it pained me to admit it, I started to realize that I missed speaking to “the world” via my podcast. I missed interacting with people who tuned in from afar because they valued my perspective. I missed traveling. I missed pursuing loftier goals.

These realizations left me feeling guilty and ashamed.

Yes, I still wanted my small-town community and garden, but that wasn’t all I wanted. I recognized how harshly I was judging myself and others who fell outside my increasingly limited definition of what it meant to live meaningfully and authentically.

Over the course of the last few months, I started to come to terms with the fact that isolating myself in Crestone for the rest of my life and judging myself for wanting more wasn’t healthy, nor sustainable.

I knew I needed to stop guilt-tripping myself about wanting to share more of myself, my experiences, and knowledge with a greater, non-local community.

It was hard to step away from what has felt so aligned and safe, but I knew it was time to step into a new cycle where I faced the outside world to ask “What’s next?”

Chris and I are so grateful to have a comfortable home and community in Crestone to come back to, but for now, we’ve decided to hit the road.

We’re headed to Baja in our van for the next couple weeks, and then plan to leave the van in Los Angeles and fly into mainland Mexico to explore Mexico City, Oaxaca, the Yucatán, and follow our curiosity wherever it leads. Perhaps we’ll find a village we like, and decide to create a little home away from home to escape to when the brutal San Luis Valley winds arrive.

The timing of our trip wasn’t organized around what feels like our country’s imminent collapse, but there is some comfort in feeling light on our feet while we try to wrap our heads around what’s transpiring in the US.

I’m already feeling inspired to share more with “the world”, and Chris and I have started to record some of the conversations we’ve been having about current events.

We’ve released two episodes so far, which you can listen to on Chris’ podcast, Tangentially Speaking:

701 - AROMA 1

702 - AROMA 2 (From Culver City, CA)

Stay tuned for more updates as Dirt Road Dispatch temporarily trades dirt roads in Crestone for dirt roads south of the border.