It never happens. But what if it does?
Navigating the big, huge, humungous dream com(ing) true!
For as many years as I’ve lived in Europe (going on 26 or 27 all told) I’ve dreamt about living in the tropics. If you count the years as a child growing up in Africa when I made up stories and talked about my future island-based animal&marine-life-sanctuary, a la Jacques Cousteau/Jane Goodall/Gerald Durrell, it amounts to most of my life. For as long as I can remember, it’s been a big dream. A persistent dream. THE dream. But always, a dream.
Every vision board I’ve created since my twenties included it and I’ve banged on about it to anyone who’d stop long enough to listen. I’ve known the big vibe and sketched the minute details of the place I’d live, and I’ve had vivid (literal) dreams about being there. It always includes being within sight and sound of the ocean; a lush landscape full of colourful plants, insects and animals; simple but beautiful home comforts; warm nights and scented air provided by the sea, trees and flowers in my garden; an always-full fruit bowl of tropical fruits; an open-air bathroom, shared by a gecko; a deep, shady verandah with a hammock, and the people I love nearby or able to come over and hang out easily and regularly.
Every time I’ve actually crossed those lines towards the equator, whether I was approaching it from the north or the south, I felt my heart ease and my body and soul respond with joy. I’m never more comfortable in my skin than when I’m in that environment between the latitudes of Cancer and Capricorn. It feels like home.
For so many reasons, and no apparent reason now that I look back at the past ten years especially, it seemed like something that would only come true in those brief sojourns I was able to make outside of my ‘real’ life. I’d tried on a few places for size but none of them fitted quite right.
And then 2020 and 2021 happened.
The world as we knew it shifted on its axis. I died and came back. My heart opened to love again in ways I never imagined it would, was broken again, and loved on regardless. My business was transforming and taking on a new shape, in flight. Everything felt sharper, faster, more urgent. Everything was clamouring for attention, demanding a response, moving at speed, and I had this intense conviction that something needed to shift. Quickly. I needed to act. Quickly. I needed to do something. QUICKLY.
So I stopped. Stopped. Said, “No!”
And went to a tropical island.
I bobbed in the ocean, I walked the sugary beaches, I swam with turtles, I had long and meandering conversations with people I love and enjoyed meeting new acquaintances, I ate all the fruits, I listened to music under the stars, I tended to my broken heart, I slept surrounded by fireflies and woke to the dance of hummingbirds and the chirp of geckos, and I soaked it all in. Every moment.
The Universe was watching and saw I was ready. At last.
And so she delivered. She delivered: BIG. Huge. Humungous.
As of right now, ten weeks later, there’s a small strip of land - with a sea-view, a large coral rock, and a tenant cow - that’s been reserved for me to share with the people I love most in the world. My business is morphing and coalescing to take up residence in a place not far from that spot and the wheels are turning to relocate, for some of the year at least, as soon as next year. I don’t have all the hows figured out yet. That’s the work to come. And, of course, it will require work because you can’t dream something like this into existence and then not show up for it. That would be rude.
I see that the dream is no longer a dream. It’s my new reality.
That’s slightly terrifying and wholly exhilarating.
And I’m here for it.
~♥~
Oh amazing. That sounds epic and I am so happy for your
You not your