Back to Our Roots

It’s been two years since I’ve had a sip of alcohol. Overlooking a breathtaking cliffside edge of the Mediterranean Sea, I unknowingly took my last sip. To arrive at this exact moment, I flew from New Jersey to the islands of Greece to spend a few days with my favorite fitness coach, Lindsey Harrod. While I had traveled solo before, my adventures involved short flights throughout Europe while studying abroad in London.

Sebastian and I recently spent 10 days in Washington camping, hiking, relaxing, working, and eating. Here’s an itinerary of how we spent our days in case you’re interested in visiting the National Parks there like we did. After spending a few days in Skamania, Washington, Sebastian met me in Portland where we embarked on our Washington adventures. Our first stop? Mount Rainier National Park. Before heading out, we stopped at Pasture PDX in Portland’s Alberta neighborhood.

The last few months have been a whirlwind of traveling, relaxing, and reflecting. 2024 had a rough start for me with vertigo-like symptoms and various puzzling health symptoms that followed. It hasn’t been an easy last few months. However, I’ve tried to use them as an excuse to slow down. It’s ok to admit to ourselves that maybe we are doing too much sometimes. I tried to be intentional about this time and use it to truly relax. Think of laying on the couch and petting the dogs. Sewing slowly.

Sebastian and I were on our way for our favorite coconut cold brew at a local coffee shop when we started talking about our favorite summer activities as children. His favorite was building model cars and rockets, setting them off outside with the neighborhood kids. My favorite was chasing butterflies around the garden with my grandmother, using my net to capture them and keep them in my little butterfly cage. Two activities that children barely do nowadays, let alone adults.

Every day, millions of people lather petroleum byproducts, highly processed vegetable oils, and lab-created chemical compounds onto their skin - AKA, our largest organ. Oh, and it’s highly likely that if you’re reading this and you either: shower, shave, use face or hair product of any kind, you too are ingesting the above man-made garbage, daily. Is it any wonder why people have higher rates of disease and generally feel crappier nowadays?

When cooking, many of us start with a recipe and gather the ingredients after. By cooking this way, we lock ourselves into going to the grocery store to buy our food. Why? Because all of the things in one recipe will never be found all at once at the farmer’s market. When we follow recipes, the ingredients are from all different seasons (unless cooking from a seasonal book). Dill, which thrives in the Arizona winter. Cucumbers, which begin growing in the early summers.

It’s beginning to be the time of year when the sun begins to rise earlier and earlier. I’ve come to really enjoy early spring and summer mornings when the birds are chirping, the world is still, and the air is still cool. Every morning I make an effort to step outside into the morning sunlight, barefoot, making my rounds through our garden. I check for new sprouts, flowers on our vegetable plants, and weeds breaking through the soil.

Hello all! Sebastian and Maddie here. This week, we are doing something a little different and having a friend of the newsletter, , contribute an article. Enjoy some thoughts on eating radically- a message we believe in deeply and are always conveying throughout our content. Look out next week for an article highlighting one of Maddie’s favorite seasonal flowers, Calendula. Thanks for reading Back to Our Roots! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

A couple of weeks ago, one of our precious irrigation timers stopped working. I thought this would be an easy fix, so I bought a new one to replace it. While installing it, I broke the PVC pipe underground and thus broke the one consistent source of water we had keeping our garden alive. I thought, OK, no problem, someone can come to fix this and it’ll be a couple of hundred bucks at worst.

Ever since I was a little girl, I loved fashion. I would find scraps of fabric and staple them together to create clutches to match each of my outfits. My cousins and I would spend our Thanksgiving dinners constructing outfits out of toilet paper and then modeling them for our families. I’m lucky to have a mother who saw how much joy fashion brought me and enrolled me in a course at the local YMCA, teaching me how to embroider beads onto a t-shirt.