Three years ago, I shut the switch off for Adventures Across. It was one of the most devastating and depressing days of my life. Years of maintaining our story, a website, a web shop ended with the click of the button. That day, I committed to shutting down my dreams forever and surrendered to my life of being a full time window cleaner.

Part of me couldn’t give up fully though. I kept a blog on Substack and Medium, created a Ko-fi store for small prints and made videos every once in awhile.

Stirrings visited me throughout the first part of this year. But it wasn’t until we took a road trip 2,000 miles away from home in Arizona for a few weeks that I reconnected with those lost parts of me.

We left half of our life in Wisconsin when we moved into Stella in 2023 that lived in a mildewy storage unit. Part of our mission was to bring our stuff back to Arizona and integrate it into our tiny life again.

Upon opening several totes I found my library of books, box of crystals, and all of the art I ever created organized neatly in portfolio binders.

Seeing the paintings of flowers, fantasy characters and landscapes hit me. It’s true I burned all of my journals pre 2023, deleted hundreds of videos and 2/3’s of the archives I created on Adventures Across. The one thing I didn’t destroy were my painting archives.