A Return To Wonder
An update on the journey
Two years ago, I quit my job, sublet my apartment, and left New York with an inclination for a different life and the need to follow it. After feeling burnt out from a corporate design job, I needed a break and planned to spend the next two months traveling and working on farms in the EU.
This time of life is one that I will always look back at as a turning point in my life. A time of exploration, seeking, wonder, and expansion. It is a time when I learned how living alongside nature brought a peace I had never before experienced. How hours on end with your hands in the earth and your mind free to wander brought some of the clearest thoughts I have ever had. The way deep conversations with people you just met allow for the pure form of self, only discoverable outside the context of “normal life.” That with a little money in savings and a willingness to live thriftily, it is absolutely possible to take more than the typical 2-3 weeks away from working in a year. In other words, it turned my idea of what “purpose and success” was upside down overnight. Two months away turned to three, four, five, and then six. With WWOOFing (a work trade farm organization), I found that my time traveling, living in community with others, and working with the land brought a type of satisfaction I had never experienced and the ability to extend my time traveling to a full six months.
What I thought would be a break for my body turned into a full-on revolution in my mind. That the point of life is for the living. Not for the working or waiting around for someone to hand you a perfect life. A common misconception in the American mindset. As one farmer mentioned early on when I questioned her by saying, “But you don’t live in reality,” after spending two blissful weeks at her farm in upstate NY, where we harvested flowers, had long lunches of delicious food harvested from the gardens, and spent afternoons lounging at a nearby creek or reading in a meadow full of flowers, bees, and butterflies. She responded, "This is my reality”. This phrase is one that I have been pondering over ever since. The idea that we can shape a reality counter to the status quo. The thought that we can create our own lives and make decisions outside of the norm was intoxicating but also quite uncomfortable to me in the beginning. Alarm bells put into place by my mind, unconsciously gripped by capitalistic fears, rang off. But what about a sense of security? What if it does not work out? What about the career that I have been growing and focused on for the last nine years? What about the friends and family that don’t understand?
The two sides of my thoughts swirled in tandem through my mind as I traveled between Norway, Italy, Wales, and Switzerland, learning about building sustainable lifestyles outside of a traditional lens and the stories of the people leading by action. Fran + Kevin: cathedral archeologists who started a farm to live in harmony with the land and provide stable local food options for their small Welsh village. Hilair + Chantel: dairy farmers born and raised in the Swiss Alps who loved their cows so much that they had not left them for more than two days in the last 50 years. You could taste the love in the cheese. Simona + Giuliano: Winemakers that had left their very successful self-built company in Rome 15 years before with a desire to pursue justice through the table and made wine that tasted of sunshine, wildflowers, and the music that blasted in the cellar each night. Bård: the farmer that loved to play. Inspired by whimsy to live in nature, with horses, whales, and the sweetest strawberries that ripened in summers of continual sunlight north of the Arctic Circle.
My heart yearned for a life like these, irrelevant outside but imperative within a small community, while my ego yelled about not giving up on the life we had been building. While I was learning of a different way to live, a new approach to life, the tethers of my past life could not help but call out. I had a whole life in NY: amazing friends, a neighborhood that felt like home, an incredible design community, and the buzzing energy of a city that never sleeps. I still had questions about this life in the city, and I was not quite ready to leave them unanswered. So after my travels, I headed back to Brooklyn with the idea of a farm in the distant future but ready to commit back to the grind. And I did: a new dream job working with incredible women doing the most fun design work in my professional life, falling more in love with my friends, and meeting new ones who feel like old ones instantly. A new apartment with a new roommate and the commitment from both of us to make it the coziest flat in the city.
A year and a half of giving it my best shot. But also a year and a half of missing my time on farms. You see. Once I had experienced a life working with my hands and full of purpose, it was impossible to forget. When I came to the point where I was starting to feel restless in my professional life, I realized that I love architecture and design, but not the corporate chains that tie it to a system of overwork, dishonest materials, and clients that are constantly asking you to work faster, harder, and cheaper. I knew something had to change. When I was considering a career pivot, I realized that I also would not be happy in any other corporate role when I knew my calling.
What started this whole thing in the first place, besides the burnout, was a vision of a place in nature. A place where honesty matters - honesty of food, values, and ideals. A respite in nature where truth is sought through nourishment, beauty, and wonder. I dream of a farm with a cafe, inn, artist retreat, and creative workshop. A place for community and gathering, for people from all walks of life to come together and trust that their bodies and souls will be equally nourished. This is the life I dream of, and if there is one thing that NYC has taught me, it is to chase your damn dreams. No one can say yes if you have already said no to yourself. So that’s what I am doing: chasing the damn dream. I am back to wwoofing this summer, first in California and then headed to France, and after that, who knows? For the first time in my life, I don’t have a plan past the next few months. And let me tell you, it feels gooooooood. Trusting in God to provide the opportunities and path forward towards this vision he has called me to. There is no rush to an end goal, launch date, or definition. I want to spend time traveling, learning from projects and people that I believe in, and soaking in all that life has to offer.
I have come to see decisions in life as simply questions we are asking through action. No decision is “right” or “wrong”; it’s more of a fuck around and find out. So, I am fucking around, finding out, and deciding what to do with the answers that come up along the way. If you have any curiosities around this, follow along on my journey through this Substack to see where it leads. I can’t promise that it will be pretty, conventional, or straightforward. But I can promise that it will be authentic and true to my vision of a life in pursuit of curiosity. You see, we only get one life in this world; why not give it all we’ve got?
Stay wondrous.
xxoo -
Callie
Emily stole my comment!! So happy to stay connected thru the magical world of Substackkk ❤️❤️❤️
thank GOD you've gotten back to writing