We had mishap after mishap and mine and Justin’s main relationship trigger is stress.

Not just stress, but a string of stress that really throws us off and disconnects us. We were good for the first round. The second, third and fourth rounds is when we fell apart.

We’ve found that when we can come together we can weather damn near anything.

But in April we let 9863653886 give us the lame excuse to not make time to come together.

We really noticed this by the end of the month. Yeah, things were stressful with tires going flat and slide breaking and the dog getting fleas and on and on.

But it was made harder by our distance from one another.

It’s too easy to allow Life become an excuse. It feels hard to not fall into that trap. But it becomes simple when you just don’t allow it too.

So we came back together. And we’ve been working on more mindfully staying that way.

Case in point: Yoga in the woods.

Early yesterday morning as I was sitting in the lake I just felt compelled. There’s a perfect deck at the RV campground we’re currently in and the weather was wonderful. (We’re in South Carolina currently.)

I came back prepared to need to jump up and down on the bed to wake him, but he was already awake and reading. I just had to ask and he was ready to go.

This morning we did it again. Although this time he convinced me to try his YogaX (from the P90X program). Yeah, that’s really not a more-than-once-a-week practice for me.

But we have some other videos and audios and plans to continue as often as we can roll ourselves out of bed before 9am.

And who wouldn’t want to get up early to watch your husband do this:

The man is an animal!

What do you do to come together?

Our formerly nomadic friends, Becky and Chris, have settled just on the edge of the quarter, a perfect spot for two artists to live and sell their work.

If you’ve been reading my blog, you’ll remember them from the NuRVers gathering we first attended in Texas two years ago, after just hitting the road. Chris and Zeb hit it off over their mutual respect for LEGO and Chris inspired an interest in sculpting in Zeb (which only makes sense for this young builder).

I – again – didn’t get nearly the photos I would have liked, especially of them and their INCREDIBLE apartment. But we did have a beautiful time with a family we feel so at ease with. And the city (with the exception of Bourbon St – not my flav) just inspired me so much. Cup = filled.

Those last two would be the only shot I got with people in it. I didn’t even get a photo with my soul sistah, Becky. Brill, Tara, brill. I guess that just gives us reason to go back again soon.

What city inspires you most?

It started Thursday, as we were driving the 5th wheel through the hills of Tennessee, reaching Knoxville during rush hour traffic, when the engine began to struggle for the power to pull 16,000 lbs up the steep incline.

We were on our way to surprise our family, who was gathering in Nashville to celebrate six generations, and my heart wanted to be there, not broke down in the parking lot of a Toys R Us.

It started there, but it didn’t stop there. Our weekend looked a little like this:

• Stress: The feeling when you send the truck up the hill on not much more than prayers.
• Anxiety: What creeps in when you almost don’t make.
• Frustration: When it’s 6:20 but everything closes at 6pm and you realize you’ll be sleeping in the parking lot right in front of the No Overnight Parking sign.
• Overwhelm: When the part you need is 24 hours away and you’re not certain it’s the right one anyway.
• Disappointment: When you have to cancel clients and the Organic Tribe.

And then it shifted into something like this:

• Sadness: When you see the stress on the face of your niece who is a new, young mama.
• Heartbreak: When she cries in your arms from exhaustion and the loneliness that can come after having a little one.
• Helplessness: When you see the unhappiness written on your brother’s face and peppered through his words from overwork and under-joy.
• Hurt: When you recognize that the only way the people you love know how to connect is through sarcasm and criticism
• Worry: When you see the lack of light in their eyes and the resistance to fun in their lives
• Concern: When the people you love are struggling to love themselves or their lives
• Powerless: It’s difficult to know the joy and love that are a part of your life are hardly a possiblity in the hearts of those you love.

• Sorrow: When I discovered that my paternal grandfather has passed away weeks before.
• Frustration: That I heard it through the grapevine, instead of through my paternal family.

It sounds like a difficult, unhappy weekend.

Six months ago it might have been. 2 years ago it certainly would’ve knocked us off course. It wouldn’t flipped our switches to anxiety, fear, and frustration, leaving us feeling sabotaged and unhappy and reeling for days.

But it wasn’t any of that.

It was beautiful. It was full of joy and connection and wonder.

Because we had love.

Love we received when I sent out a text to friends and family and received support in the form of prayers, Reiki, and kindness.

Love we found ourselves surrounded by on the side of the highway, with family and offers of help just 2 hours in one direction and three in the other.

Love I gave myself when I was about to snap in frustration.

Love I found within myself to give to my husband as he struggled with overwhelm and frustration.

Love that became awe and appreciation when he turned misfortune into miracles and rebuilt the part we couldn’t order to get us into town.

Love and gratitude we gave each other in a dozen moments, in the parking lot, at dinner out, before we got back on the road.

Love we found in the form of peace as we reminded ourselves that we are safe, that we all is well, that we are exactly where we’re meant to be, even if we can’t see why.

Love that gave us the ability to access peace, lean into Trust, practice mindfulness and patience and radical acceptance.

Love that reminded us to choose fun, gratitude, and beauty at every opportunity.

Love that I called on and found within myself to shine light and joy into the hearts of my family.

Love that I found in holding my great-niece, dance her to sleep and watch her eyes as they tried to tell me the secret of the Universe.

Love that I saw all over my brother’s face as he held and kissed and lit up around his beautiful granddaughter.

Love I felt between our hearts as I hugged longer and listened deeper and offered hope and support where I could.

Love that I continued to receive from my circles of friends in the form of texts and messages and emails and energy and prayers that I felt all weekend long.

Love that I dwelled in at the celebration of six living generations and the wonder and growth that this new little girl is bringing into our lives.

Love at the sound of laughter from my nieces as we hula hooped, visited the zoo or went horseback riding.

Love I felt with the dozens of small heart connections Justin and I would continue to make with a touch, a hug, a look, a reminder of one another and our support for each other.

Love for my husband as I saw him inspiring fun and laughter, silliness and playfulness for his nieces and the whole family in the ways that only a juggling, kilt-wearing, bike-riding-inside-Target uncle can.

Love for my son as he held my hand as I cried for my grandfather, or told us how luck he was to have parents like us, or made the whole family laugh.

And love for myself. As I acknowledged my own growth. My own strength. My own ability to remove the barriers to love I’ve held within myself and the beauty and joy accessed when I do.

My ability to continue to shine my own real self, not the person my family has known me to be in the past. My ability to continue to make my own joyful noise to fill the quiet spaces. To inspire fun and connection. To reach out. Love deeper. But not deplete myself.

I can’t tell you exactly why Life is so tough at times.

I can’t explain why we were meant to break down, why my niece gets to struggle as a single mama, why my brother has gotten to experience so much hurt in his life, why any of us have.

Except maybe that it’s so we can discover that love can still be found in those moments.

That joy can still be accessed when stress is threatening.

That beauty and wonder are always present, not despite the heartache, but sometimes because of it.

That the Truth of what is can overcome the fear of what might be.

To discover that fear needn’t be “pushed through” but simply loved on.

That peace and Trust come from within, not from the circumstances in our life.

I can’t exactly show you how all the dots of my weekend are being connected in my spirit, how the contrasting emotions played themselves out moment by moment; I can’t tell you exactly what it all means and why.

I’ve barely had time to process it myself…except to say that when I close my eyes in stillness all I hear echoing is the power of love.

And that sounds about right, the purpose of all of these messy bits of our lives – to understand what is and what isn’t love, and how and where one can and can’t access it, and how this incredible force of Nature is like the air, waiting to be breathed in or carried away on.

It came to an end this past weekend as we started heading north to connect with our new caravan (yay!).

Florida is Uh! Maz! Ing! I can’t imagine the summer heat + humidity, but I can imagine tolerating it for such gorgeous winters.

We fell in love with the Keys, with the warm Atlantic, with the white sands of the Gulf, both areas we want to return to.

We had ideas of what we would do more of this winter, of all the people we had hoped to see. But juggling my coaching practice, plus our other businesses, and travel planning and life in general…we ended up doing much more at home and together than we thought.

It’s one reason why we’re looking forward to wrapping up some of our big projects before heading north with the caravan: The families we’ll be traveling with will bring in a lot of balance, support in travel planning, as well as gatherings that we’ll co-create to bring us together with new and old friends in the communities we visit. (I can’t wait to share more, but it’s still in the works. Soon! I promise!)

We’ve been busier than we’ve ever been, which means some things have gone by the wayside – like my photos. Thankfully I have Instagram which will automagically post them to Flick for me. But they are all disorganized and I still have dozens on my camera with no motivation to touch them. So I would link to a Flick set to show you all of what we’ve been up to, but instead I’m just going to link you to a starting point in my stream and let you work from there.

I’ve also struggled with hypoglycemia and woke up yesterday with too low blood sugar, almost passing out and taking several hours to recover. Not good.

So I’m adding in salmon on intuition and am feeling better now. (Justin is going to continue going without for awhile longer.)

We have had so many questions on the elimination diet and how to do it and I think it can pretty much all be boiled down to this:

Listen to your body. Trust it.

Every body is different, and each individual’s needs will vary throughout their life too.

Food dogma is bullshit. Intuition is king.

We chose this elimination diet on intuition. We choose to follow it how our intuition guides us.

And the more we do that, the better we feel.

Heart = Full

Happy Full Moon

Even though we’ve been learning how to fill our bellies, my heart right now is expanding like WHOA.

The past few months have been rough for us, and we’ve been consistently pulled back to look for the cause and the shifting Life is asking us to make.

Zeb has been really struggling.

Really struggling.

He’s 12.5 now and becoming a man, not as smoothly as we had hoped (ah, those parental ideas – that’s a whole story in itself).

It hasn’t been fun to say the least.

It’s been hard.

And Justin and I have been triggered a lot.

And individually and together we’ve had some really bad moments that suck suck suck.

But thankfully we leaned into our tribes and our tools and we kept coming back, kept making amends for the mistakes, kept putting our intentions and our heart into finding what’s missing for all of us, what each of us needs to thrive.

We kept coming back to the drawing board again and again.

Until we finally had the Aha moment. The breakthrough.

In a few heart-wrenching, emotional and deeply connecting conversations Zeb articulated what was happening beneath the surface for him.

Beneath the anger and the frustration and the blah and the rut.

He’s lonely.

He enjoys traveling, but it’s not filling his cup with a Tribe of his own.

He wants more than Mom and Dad.

Going back to Vegas was a wonderful thing for him. But it was only temporary.

And he struggles to connect with people as we travel. He can feel awkward and uncomfortable until he warms up – like we all experience at some point. And so as we go along he feels withdrawn more than he’d like to without that extra time to settle into a comfortable place with people. By the time he’s forming a connection, either we or the other family is heading off.

Can I tell you what a GIANT sigh of relief it is to finally hear this from him?

For a long time he couldn’t put his finger on it. Even when we would check in with him about it, he wasn’t fully aware of it.

It can be hard as a kid (heck, for most adults too) to see with clarity what is really happening inside.

He needs community.

And we have been feeling that same need ourselves.

Zeb needs guys to hang with, to run with, to laugh with, to grow with.

Justin needs men to connect with, to sit with, to feel like himself with.

I need women to hug with, to walk with, to celebrate with, to dance with.

We also want to continue to travel!

So we talked and drew out our ideas.

We discussed traveling one more year to see the East coast, then settling down so Zeb could try out a Sudbury School.

But one year felt like a long time to wait.

Then a beautiful traveling family, Angela and Clint and their 3 kids, invited us to their budding caravan, but they were headed to the West coast and had plenty of big plans and it just didn’t seem like the pieces would fit.

The idea of not joining them had me bummed.

I resonated so strongly with the families that were already gathering around the idea. I loved the moments I had been able to grab here and there with them – at the first Full Moon feast in January, at a FOTR rally, even through email when we could.

But I’ve learned enough in my 30 years to not try to force anything. That it never works best that way. That things either happen organically or they don’t happen all that well.

So I stressed a little. And let go a little. And leaned into Trust a little.

And tried to remind myself that when we plant the seeds of our intentions, Life/Spirit/magic happens.

And it did.

Around the Fire

Angela and Clint invited us again to another full moon feast – a monthly gathering of traveling and non-traveling families and friends to eat, talk, connect, make music and make even more laughter.

We couldn’t camp with them, but we drove 45 minutes to visit for the evening.

Zeb ran off with the kids.

Justin drummed with the men.

I connected with the women.

Fire dancing mamas!

We felt at home.

And my heart ached a little to know it would only last an evening this time.

And then I heard the most beautiful thing I could imagine.

And it’s bringing tears to my eyes to write it out.

Angela explained how their plans had shifted. How they aren’t heading to the West coast. How they are traveling up the East coast this year. Exactly to the place we wanted to most see.

Inside my heart jumped a little.

Said a tiny Eep!

Goosebumps. And tears. And hugs. And laughing. And “See?”

She and I knowing and seeing (again) that Trust always leads us in the most beautiful direction.

That everyone’s needs – for connection, for adventure, for timing – will always be met.

That this was the beginning of a beautiful thing.

Zeb is on board. Wholeheartedly. Can’t wait.

Justin’s feeling it out, has some hesitation to examine, some things to sit with internally. But I can trust fully the right pieces will fall into the right place and at the right time now.

And my heart is filled to the brim with the idea of having our own tiny, traveling village of mindful parents, and passionate women, and strong, gentle men and confident children, and entrepreneurs, and autodidacts, and diversity, and laughter.

We have details to work out, and schedules to coordinate, and plans to create.

After all, this isn’t JUST a caravan they’re planning – it’s bigger than that. And I can’t wait to share it.

But right now I’m just happy to share my heart and my soul and my answered prayers and the smile and excitement of my previously sullen 12 year old whose cup is finally being filled.

And to share this little reminder: Lean into Trust. Life is good.

But I am loving Instagram (@tarawagner) and the ability to snap a quick photo for posterity, add a cute filter and upload to multiple online places all at once. (If I’m really busy I take them with the regular camera, which let’s me take multiple all at once, and import them into Instagram for filtering and uploading as we’re driving.)

It’s not the same as what would come from my Canon, and there are twinges of guilt I feel for not keeping up with it (I have photos from Christmas that are still on my memory card), but I can’t ignore the sense of ease it brings. And ease is good when you travel full-time.

Some recent photos from our days in Daytona Beach:

That was my hole in one.

Life has been interesting lately. Thankfully “interesting” is not code for “really overwhelming” or “downright shitty” although we’ve had those moments here or there.

No, interesting in that we’re hitting a good stride, pieces are falling into place, while new challenges arise that actually don’t knock us senseless. We’ve been creating and recreating and the hubby and I both have tons of goodness coming to all of you this year.

The photo above is of the living area of our RV.

There’s a rocket project on the table, clean and dirty dishes in the sink, juggling props on the seat, piles of pillows and blankets on the couch (which has been almost permanently folded down into a bed for over a week). What you can’t see is the piles of clothing in our room or the piles of…well, piles of piles in Zeb’s.

Yes, it only takes us 5 minutes to straighten up and 30 to clean from top to bottom. But it only takes about as long to get it dirty again.

This used to drive me batty.

Being a highly sensitive person, my exterior surroundings would seriously affect my interior surroundings. And they still do – I spent the morning cleaning up our room and we spent a few minutes last night tidying up the living area.

The more I practice my own mindfulness the smoother my day runs, the easier I take the (literal and figurative) ”messy” parts of life in stride, the more grounded I can feel when Life happens (or threatens to topple down on us).

My biggest struggle is in allowing myself to create the space I need to practice the very things that help me to feel this way.

My pattern USUALLY goes like this:

• Realize I need to fill my cup – badly
• Go into Catch-up mode to love myself better
• Feel amazing, empowered, productive and grounded
• So amazing, empowered, productive and grounded that I forget I need to maintain this practice DAILY
• Realize I’ve neglected myself again and try to catch up

I was talking with my girlfriends a couple weeks ago. We connect as a group on the phone nearly every week to collectively support one another in our personal and professional goals, and we took a moment to touch on the things that we get to do for ourselves right now as we focus on some deeper things.

As they were each sharing, it clicked for me that my goal of water-food-essential oils-walking-yoga-meditation-fun-downtime-unpluggedness was NOT what I was really needing.

All of those things spring organically from one place – my mindfulness and my commitment to meeting myself and Spirit in Stillness.

In short, what was a list I was about to rattle off to them became one thing – meditation.

Each and every day I meet that Stillness, the actions of drinking enough water or eating the right foods or getting up and moving or choosing to shut it all down or keeping up with the clutter happen organically.

I know this and yet I allowed myself to be distracted from it.

Again.

Stillness is where I see my next step clearly. Stillness is where I hear my Organic Wisdom speaking. Stillness is where I access my creativity and where all my best ideas come from. Stillness is where I THRIVE.

And I resist it.

And I resist doing the work to DIG IN to why I resist it.

Until I’m running on empty and coaching myself toward my own work again. (Funny how that happens. )

Right now I’m enjoying the quiet of the library (and fast wifi – hallelujah) and breathing and feeling grounded and productive because I took 10 minutes today to stretch and breath. I didn’t meditate. But I did choose mindfulness, my living meditation. And I’m feeling the affects.

I’m also feeling that whisper that asks, “Why do you resist what you know is so, so good?” And I’m stubbornly answering with “I’ll get to that later.”

And I’m smiling at myself and the utter ridiculousness of human resistance and acknowledging the pattern…not just of the pattern of my own messiness but of learning what the messiness is still teaching me.

But we rocked it.

We stayed in Marathon, in a tiny little (slightly shabby) cottage on the beach, for only $100 a night. (Yellowtail Inn.)

We ate amazing seafood with our fingers, and laughed as the dog discovered the ocean, and drank a little too much rum, and drunk texted because how could we not.

We did a little dancing, but not nearly enough. And toured Duval St and held hands and smiled and made love.

And we realized two things:

1. We really must live by the beach one day. Preferably in the Keys. For really.
2. We really must make little adventures like this take place more often. Like monthly. Turning the computers off and setting our autoresponders on our email and creating a mini Adventure Week. Every month. Seriously. We do work for ourselves and loving the hell of our life and doing it our way is one of the perks of that. So we’re making that happen.

Justin’s favorite part: “Feeding the fish” over the side of the boat…watching a jellyfish eat his lunch really did it for him.

My favorite part: Snorkeling. And watching Justin feed the fish.

I totally thought this said Tampon Feeding.

It’s funny; I recently remembered I set the intention to create some fun home videos over two years ago.

It makes me smile to realize yet another forgotten intention came to fruition in its own timing. Mmm…the things I used to stress over I’ve learned to trust and allow. That feels good (now to learn how to apply it to other areas).

P.S. Apparently, YouTube censored my video because of the song I used to show our videos and pictures. Ironically, it was the song “One Love” by Bob Marley…you know, the guy all for love and gratitude, instead of greed. Apparently, the record company didn’t get the memo. I wish I had time to redo it but I don’t – and I’m leaving it up because I can still watch it. But I’ve included our photos of our time below as a lame alternative to an otherwise great video.

We stayed two weeks and I so fell in love.

I fell in love with the calm waters of the Gulf, and listening to them as I fell asleep. I sooo loved laying in the sun, soaking up the sun in the cool breeze. The nearby bookstore and library. The beautiful homes with observation decks to see the water. The locally-own natural food store and their aaaaaamazing cheese!

Granted, I haven’t visited in the middle of summer. Maybe I wouldn’t love the area so much then.

But NOW…oh, it so deeply fed my soul to lay my blanket out, and sink my toes in and just BE right in that moment, sinking into meditation and feeling all the scattered parts of myself come back together, reconnecting to that sense of gratitude.

I can see us snowbirding to Grayton over and over again.

In fact, Justin applied to camp host there. Four months in that gorgeous place? Yes please.

Some photos from our time (and our Thanksgiving) at the beach (you can see all the photos here):