How Covid Inspired Sustainable Change
2020 was overall a shitshow of a year, however, it inspired me to make some very drastic changes that lead further down the sustainable path I was already on. I was in the tribe of “nothing would ever be the same” pretty early on. Today, I still hear people talking about things “going back to normal” and in my mind, that is living in denial. This is our new normal and honestly, I do not wish to to back to the way things were was before. Sure, I wish I could visit my aging parents and rest of my family that live over 2000 miles away. It would also be awesome to do a lot of things I did before, however I like to think that what is happening is exactly what needs to happen to go forward. That is where I intend to go...FORWARD!
The sooner we can admit that change is inevitable, the sooner we can adapt. Don’t get me wrong, although I am not in denial of the current state of the world, I still am working out the adapting part. I guess I just feel solid about when and how I started taking action to adapt. By June of last year, my partner, fur baby, and I were on our way to Colorado to pick up and renovate the 30′ travel trailer pictured in my previous post, sight unseen except for pictures. We spent a month at Jeff’s mom’s house making the inside of the trailer feel more like a home. We tore out a lot of things and sold or donated most of what we removed.
By the beginning of July, we made the journey back to San Diego to park our new home on a magical slice of land I manifested before we left. The story of how that went down will have to wait for now. Everything just fell in place...it was pretty amazing!
Because of our sense of urgency to be more self sufficient, we invested our money in something that we could call our own instead of sinking more money into our one bedroom rental. Before we left San Diego, we started to pack and pair down a lot of our belongings. Part of what made our move possible was the “failure” of my mobile sustainable boutique I had launched the pervious fall. I had to face the fact that shopping in the enclosed space of a 12′ cargo trailer was not going to work anytime the near future. I made the hard decision to convert the trailer back into a storage / office space for my business.
Jeff and I are both handy in different ways. I am the creative one and he makes the execution happen. I get my hands dirty too, but the solar panels were on him. He is very mechanically inclined. So now I sit in my cozy RV tiny home powered by the sun parked on land surrounded by a natural preserve beginning to tell the story of how I got here. It started with a love of nature that lead to simple changes over a long period of time. Now I want to share my journey because sometimes it helps to know this type of shit does not happen over night!