Changes
2019 was the start of epic changes for me (allow me to recap for a moment before I get to the good stuff). It started out in January when…
2019 was the start of epic changes for me (allow me to recap for a moment before I get to the good stuff). It started out in January when Shucks (Steve) and I took a 6-week winter getaway trip to Belize and then onto Puerto Rico. By this time, I had been in the ER for a year and a half (nursing for 3 years, healthcare for a total of 9 years), and I was growing discontent with the stress and long hours as well as the long, cold, dreary winters of the Pacific Northwest. In fact, the September leading up to this trip, I had announced to the Universe that I was entering my last year of hospital nursing and was going to find some other more enjoyable and less stressful path where I could get back into some of my more gratifying creative endeavors. In addition to my stressful schooling and career, we had moved four times in the seven years we lived in North Idaho, and had also hosted several family members in our home for almost four years, including his father with late stage dementia who needed full time care. This trip was a chance for us to unwind and for me to focus on wellness, as the stress had taken a toll. We were also considering buying a vacation rental that we could travel to in the winter, one of the motivating factors for visiting PR.
Our plan was to travel to the island to see if we could find an affordable beach condo. But the second day in PR, Shucks had a hunch about visiting an intriguing remote mountain property in the central western mountains that he found on Zillow. He often gets these hunches and they almost always turn out to be significant and life changing for us.
This time was no different. When we wound our way up into the green canopy of the mountains on a 4-wheel-drive-only road, we landed on a little knoll of a 39 acre coffee farm on the top of a mountain with its own natural spring, many exotic fruits and edible plants, banana trees galore, clouds so close it seemed you could touch them, epic views, and a cute but rustic little house. A spell was cast upon us. From the very first instant, we felt like this place chose us. There were too many miracles and synchronicities to tell here about how we got the property (maybe for another book someday), but from the beginning, we were given a vision for this little mountain retreat and everything fell into place perfectly for us to buy it.
One little miracle I must share: many years before (12 to be exact), we had been directed in our hearts to sell a house we built and give the equity to establish an orphanage in Haiti and the rest to help feed, shelter, and educate orphans in India. Some of you might remember that we worked with a ministry called, Hopegivers International. It’s a beautiful story that I wrote about in my book, One Million Arrows: Raising Your Children to Change the World, about how the Universe clearly directed us to sell the house and promised that we would always be taken care of. Due to some miraculous and fortuitous real estate investments during our eight years in N. Idaho (we had very little savings after giving away our home), we were able to pay cash for our new PR property and the Universe called my attention to the fact that the price was exactly the same price it cost to build the original home that we sold for the orphans…down to the last cent!
We returned in April to complete the purchase and at that time, we felt like the name for it came to us, Refugio. This was surely our little refuge from the stress and storms of life that we had been through, and would hopefully be the same for countless others someday when our vision was manifested.
In May of 2019 and through a particularly synchronous timing of events, I was offered a very interesting position as a nurse manager at an elite residential golf course and lake resort in Coeur d’Alene (CDA) for the summer. Gozzer Ranch is famous for being a second home to many movie stars and wicked-rich people. The job would be practically stressless compared to the ER and would look good on my resume (and it would be kind of fun bumping into people like Michael Jordan and Adam Levine), so I decided to take it. I stayed on with the ER until the end of June, but marveled at how my intentions the previous September had really panned out!
In early June, Shucks went ahead to PR to start taking care of the new mountain property while continuing his web development work from our new home. We had been apart before, like for the entire year I went to nursing school in Wyoming. Also, my previous ER job in CDA was an hour away from home so I usually stayed in CDA three days a week. We were pretty used to time apart. We knew the summer would go by quickly and then I could move to PR. We were uncertain about my future career path, but we knew he would be able to keep his online work while I continued to focus on recovering.
And this is where things get sticky. It was during this stretch in the summer of 2019 — while being happily, contentedly married to my soulmate of twenty years, ready to start a new chapter in our lives on our little paradise mountaintop in Puerto Rico — that I unintentionally and accidentally fell in love. With a woman.
I can’t tell you how difficult this is for me to share publicly. It’s agonizing. I’ve been putting it off for nearly three years now. But I don’t want to hide myself anymore — I’ve done plenty of that in the past. I want to live confidently in the light and know that the people in my life are choosing to be here.
Many people who read this are not going to be able to understand. They are going to assume that I have lost my way, that I have gone to the dark side, that I have given into temptation, that I have given Satan a foothold, or ______________(fill in the blank). And yeah, what if? What if all of those are true? What if none of them are true? Either way, so what? I’m just one person in seven billion trying to figure out my life — how to be a happy, successful, healthy, liberated, fearless, loving person — to the best of my ability. If I lose (or lost) my way, or if I lose all my “friends” (again), the sun will still rise tomorrow, time will still continue unfolding The Story, and I will eventually figure out who I am and what I am supposed to be doing here. Either way (lost or found), I’m having an experience and it is teaching me more about myself than I could ever have known without it.
I want to make it very clear that I am not here to defend myself or to endure spiritual abuse from stone-throwers. I don’t want anyone to give me advice or to try to fix me or tell me that I need to repent and come back to Jesus. I am already whole (in the eyes of my Most High) amid my myriad of broken pieces. It is the broken pieces and unresolved questions that I am here to sort through this year. Hopefully some readers here who are in touch with their humanity will be able to identify with similar inner struggles and confusion. Perhaps others will learn compassion, if not understanding.
So that’s why I’m here. I want to talk about many of the angles of my inner struggles in the past three years. Most of them surround the “new normal” but many of them were merely brought out by it (or by the craziness of the recent collective scene). Some days I’m a mess. A few stretches I’ve even felt suicidal. Other days I feel like it’s all going to be okay. And very occasionally, I even get glimpses that it’s going to be amazing and miraculous.
So I know you have many questions. Those of you who know me well are wondering what happened to my wonderful, loving, adventurous, hot hunk of a husband and the epic romance about which I wrote in my first book, The Perfect Fit: Piecing Together True Love? In the next blog, I will continue on with my story.