Islands as portals.

shifting perspective to shift a life

Hey there,

I have been trying to share this story with you for months now but I just couldn't make it make sense. Seems all I needed was even more distance. I wrote this while traveling to see my sister in Texas—my first time leaving Colorado since I spent most of October through January traveling in Europe.

I also recently heard someone tell the story of going to an island alone because she had some things to work out and some healing to do, and chose a tiny island to hold and heal this process.

I have been drawn to islands again lately. Perhaps it's because of the time I spent alone on a Mediterranean island, nurturing my creativity. Or perhaps it's because I recognize my own experience in the story.

I also know the mystery and magic of making a portal of an island.

---

Terceira, Azores Islands, Portugal
September 2013–October 2015

I'd never been outside of North America when I moved to a small island in Portugal in 2013. There were endless emerald patchwork fields and a horizon of ocean holding the curve of the world. What I didn't know when I walked straight off the plane onto the tarmac is that the violent wind carrying salt and sea can be explained by the isolation of the Azores.

Nearly 1,000 miles from anywhere and a third of the way across the North Atlantic to America from mainland Europe, there's nothing else out here except the Titanic. There's also nothing to stop the hurricane force winds when you're alone out in the ocean. The archipelago of nine islands is a mountain range so wide, even the next island over was far enough I only made it once in the two years I lived there. Aggressively luscious, the mountains tipping toward the sky in the middle of the islands are the volcanoes that breached. Though relatively inactive, you never forget what lies below the water or your feet. And another thing lies within this kind of isolation. This fragility shoves the most sturdy of us into new kinds of self-reliance and community.

Each of the towns skirting the round island experience their own climate. I lived in a tiny coastal village called Porto Martins with a microclimate that could grow coffee beans and vine variety wine grapes, whereas most of the rest of the island was covered in grazing milk cows and boxed-in wine grape bushes. I lived on a quinta in a house called Adega Mendes on small road named Caminas das Vinhas. My home exterior mimicked a traditional Azorean cellar, and I learned what it meant to create a life there.

I was a military spouse then, so I didn't just move to Terceira unexpectedly. I was left alone there with my dog suddenly for over 6 months while my husband served a deployment. I was 23 which meant I thought I was too young to settle down alone, and too old to go back home. I was barely out of college, still newly wed, and had no bearings. I was adrift at sea, it seemed. I wanted to be anywhere else. Until I decided to learn how to be there.

By the time I left at age 25, I’d discovered my love of international travel, explored my passion of peacemaking, and built a local community. I developed many new skills like playing guitar, photography, blogging, vegetable gardening, grape and coffee harvest, solo travel, basic Portuguese language, and making homemade pizza in a traditional brick oven. I launched a freelance design career, defined my faith, and first visited the Palestinian people — three directions that would end up shaping the next decade of my life, perhaps more than any other decisions than building our family the way we wanted.

I landed in Terceira terrified, alone, aimless. I left the island exposed to the world in ways I instinctively knew there'd be no going back. On this island, I did a lot of experimenting and so much questioning. What was my purpose? What did I believe? Where did I belong? What were my values? Who was I in solitude when I was totally free to choose?

It was far more than simply the adventure of new passport stamps or the confines of military orders that formed this season: it was the slow pruning of adolescence and being intentional about how I would actually build my life while navigating these challenges. Maybe we could chalk it all up to natural quarter-life turning points. Or maybe I learned to work with the alchemy of a particular microclimate on an island in the Atlantic.

This was the fertile ground where I needed to turn isolation into intention. This little island in the middle of nowhere could be the center of the world. Why not? It was where I learned to bloom where I was planted.

---

Mallorca, Balearic Islands, Spain
October 2024–January 2025

I flew to Palma de Mallorca in October for a reunion with friends. This crew has traveled together like a band of wolves–a wandering commune–caring for each other through the seasons and across the landscapes since we met in Italy in 2022. When we were together on Mallorca, we made art and shared meals and cried and wrote and we saw it all. We spent seven days crisscrossing the island to explore and make new experiences in every direction.

When I got an invitation to go again to the island in December, I tried to figure out how to spend four months in Spain, but it wasn't right. The burdens of housing, visas, work, health, family–it was all saying no, pause. This isn't right for you right now. Still, I couldn't help then but promise the island and myself that I'd be back in December. Throughout the initial trip and the weeks back in Colorado in the in-between, I was already in the future, dreaming for December.

By the end of the year, life was even more challenging. I would have taken the chaos of October than what came after. I was unraveling and no longer felt like myself. My life felt so misaligned from how I wanted to be showing up, and I couldn't find a way to redirect in the middle of it. I kept thinking about Mallorca, like there was something else there for me. I was remembering what my first island, Terceira, taught me about the incubation powers of an island. Something inside me was still saying to go back. And even though it scared me, I wanted to listen.

But I wasn’t sure I was allowed to voice what I needed to ask in order to go back: What if I asked my husband to stay behind? What if I spent the holidays alone? What if I didn't know Spanish but wanted to learn? Can I afford to draw down client work for a couple months (in an already risky time) and commit myself to my writing projects? Is it responsible to exercise the depths of my privilege to travel like this when things feel like such a mess? Could I actually quiet input into my mind, move the needle on finishing my book, and heal from a disastrous year?

I was full of uncertainty and out of options. But I already knew the impact of solitude, travel, and creativity in my life. It was my holy trinity.

Even if it wouldn’t have made sense to others, it still made sense to me. I made difficult choices to miss things I thought I’d be around for, and I held the hard conversations that needed to happen to make room for this unconventional journey. This a struggle because I had been so lost in distress for months that my relationships were already barely hanging on. And I was asking for so much more.

I was met with support and clarifying questions that helped me better define my intentions for this extended trip. Those who could’ve begged me to stay helped me figure out how to pull it off. Frankly, I think this reception has a lot to do with living my “widdershins”, counter-clockwise life out loud. The people closest to me are fairly unsurprised when I say things like “I think I’m going to an island by myself for a couple months over the holidays to get away from it all and perhaps rewrite my book in Spain.”

Now I had full permission to embrace the isolation and figure out what to do next. Logistically, I had an amazing place to house-sit, and it would be easy to stay put in Palma: I'd already seen been all over the island with my Italy group. I could be as still as I needed to be.

This wasn't a vacation or a sabbatical. This was a pilgrimage requiring an intentionally blank itinerary to hold the space to make new maps as the way through this evolution and revolution, and all that would come next.

I booked my single ticket and I packed my bags.

I've found that when following your intuition, you can almost always trust that you're where you need to be when (not if) the challenges come. This manifested for me immediately.

The first thing that happened is I missed two connections due to severe weather and my bag got lost. It was delivered to me three days later still water logged from the time it spent in the rain on the way over. My books and printed manuscript were ruined. Then I got sick and hurt my back. Alone on an island where I knew no one and had a house and pets to care for, I could barely get off the couch much less do all the writing I meant to be working on. Forget about the healing I thought I'd earned by merely making the trip possible.

Had I been healthy and uninjured, I probably would have continued over-working and staying burned out, just someplace quiet and new with nicer weather and food. On the heating pad on the couch, I could only just be. The only things I could comfortably do was listen, make tiny creations, and let my body rest. Once I was finally up for it, sometimes I worked on my book, but more often I took walks around the city and worked on puzzles and played with watercolors. Sometimes I searched for Palma’s best cafes, bakeries, and bookstores, and other times I walked down to the centro to be surrounded by people but entirely anonymous.

Nothing happened, at least not that I can articulate well with language and anecdotes. I had the most boring, chill, silent, unhurried, unproductive, soft retreat you could imagine. There are hardly any photos or stories. What I did do is spend so much time alone in my own world that I could begin to hear a voice. This voice belonged to an exhausted, burnt out, grieving, lonely woman. She was saying thank you, thank you, thank you. To herself, to the island, to me.

She started asking familiar questions. What was my purpose? What did I believe? Where did I belong? What were my values? Who was I in solitude when I was totally free to choose?

On the long walks and blank pages, I began to reconnect with 23 year old me. I looked back at a girl alone on an island who leaned hard into being an artist, a wanderer, a leader, a believer. She reminded me that I could (re)create a life I loved in the midst of the uncertainty. That I did not have to continue charging ahead, keeping pace with my own unrealistic expectations, internalizing misdirected failure, or demanding a map for the unknowable.

She’d been practicing something I’d forgotten. She wasn’t as bogged down by adult life as I am, so I knew to listen. I asked her to keep talking. She whispered: You already know what you need. You already have what you want.

I flew home on January 20th, which was a form of bizarre time traveling for several reasons. It took another eight weeks before I knew which way was up.

All this time alone meant I'd remembered routines and rhythms I loved and wanted to embody in my home life. I remembered that I felt most like myself when I was creating. I remembered that alone time is how I can hear my own creativite spirit and intuitive soul. I remembered travel makes me feel more at home in the world than anywhere else. My re-entry work has been applying the lessons of the island and continuing to embrace the journey of becoming the person I needed to be: to come home, to finish the book rewrite, to live out my creativity and purpose, to show up well in my relationships and community.

I didn’t always feel like I was on an island when on Mallorca the way I did when I was in the Azores. Nearly 25 times the size of Terceira, I constantly forgot I was surrounded by the Mediterranean. Perhaps it was just the size difference or possibly my prolonged stress that made it feel like I was watching my life transform from the outside, moving slowly through time, existing in a quiet dream. Somehow the physical, mystical, and spiritual can collide into a portal.

Truly, you can’t really see an island–or a life–until you get high above it or sail away to gain perspective. Reality is more clear in retrospect.

Like a Near Death Experience.

Like a Near Life Experience.

It turns out that you can trust yourself. You can make some distance to see things more right-sized. You can go someplace solo to do nothing but tend to yourself. You can curate your own combination of holy trinity guides in the container of an island or anywhere. You can remember who you are and that you already know what to do next.

You can create an experience to shift your perspective just enough to shift your life.

---

Wandering home,

---

Need a little more creativity in this season? I’m co-creating a space for curious people to spend time creating, experiment with art, and be a part of global creative community. We start this Friday, March 21. Let me know if you’d like to join us!

The Artist's Wayfinding: An Experiment