From McMansion to Mobile Home: Our Journey to Cosmic Acres

After toying around with the best place to start this new blog series (and wondering if I really wanted to share that much of my personal life on my totally public website and blog), I decided to get all Nike with it and Just Do It. Right here, right now, on the Interiority Complex blog, for all the world to see.  (Besides, in keeping with my promise to simplify my life, I figured building a whole new website was not in alignment with my new mission.)

So what’s this new blog series about?

On the surface, it may just look like a blog about how to downsize, how to fix up any space,  how to design on a dime and how to beautify and/or simplify your décor, but honestly, there’s more. You see, it’s also about my journey to find a more blissful, meaningful, quiet, organic, simple and cosmic way of life.  It’s about our family’s adventure to the center of our souls.  It’s about going from a mainstream McMansion on a ½ acre of manicured hell, to a modest mobile home on 10 acres of undeveloped heaven (which we fondly call, Cosmic Acres).  It’s about going off the grid in-style. It’s about finding simplicity and beauty in the daily chaos of our lives. It’s about clearing the clutter and focusing on what’s important, creating something amazing & finding true happiness.

Now, don’t get me wrong, while I love communing with nature, and my dream home just happens to be a pre-fab modular home nestled on 10 acres, I also love to have cocktails at the W Hotel with my girlfriends, can’t live without my weekly sushi fix,  have a penchant for decorating fabulous spaces, get a kick out of accessorizing my clothing ensembles with colorful beads, baubles, bracelets & handbags and love me some 5-Star Hotel & Resort vacation-action.

Call me Cybill. Maybe I have a split personality, or just a permanent identity crisis.  Who knows?

Why am I writing this blog series?

After we made the leap out of the ‘burbs and onto a road slightly less traveled, people started coming out of the woodwork asking about the process. When our journey comes up in casual conversation, folks always want to know more about how we did it, where to begin, what it’s like and how they, too, could integrate some or all of these steps to simplify their own lives. I can’t help but think there’s something more to this and that I’m not the only one who has a latent (and for me, now, a not-so latent) desire to live like a free-spirit. (Or at least a semi-free spirit, if there is such a thing.)

In this blog, it is my intention to answer many of the questions I receive, and combine hints and how-to’s with humor and humility in a blog series that will inspire those of you who wish to permanently, or even slightly, change the way you live.

Who might like to read this?

If you can relate to any or all of these items, then you will probably dig this blog series:

• You saw the Tom Shadyac segment “From Millionaire to Mobile Home” on Oprah (the title of which inspired the title of this blog entry) and wanted to immediately put your home on the market and drop a majority of your belongings off at the closest Goodwill. (However, you decided not to pursue this idea because where would you host the next bunko and where would everyone sit???)
• Keeping up with the Joneses sounds about as much fun as having a root canal.
• The thought of going off the grid and living more “organically”  appeals to you, yet you still like your stylish spaces, you shave your pits & legs, love your mascara and don’t know the first thing about growing kale, much less, integrating it into a recipe.
• You find yourself laughing at (then relating to) the scene in Old School when Frank the Tank refuses to bong a beer because he has a “pretty nice little Saturday” planned with a trip to Home Depot… and maybe even Bed, Bath & Beyond (if they have enough time, of course.)
• You find yourself asking things like, “Isn’t there more to life? How can I achieve who I’m really meant to be and do what I was put here to do?  I want to live a more authentic life, but where do I start?”
• You find the questions above way too overwhelming to even begin to answer so you cruise Facebook instead.

I hope you’ll come with me as I document this journey. I also hope you’ll chime in when you can. I want to hear your questions, your advice, your experiences, your successes and your challenges.  It’s my hope that we’ll learn together and we’ll laugh together.  (I just really hope we don’t cry together – this isn’t that kind of blog.)

So now, if you’re ready to dive in, then check out my first entry… A Weed-Inspired Journey.

Peace Owt & Word to Your Mutha Earth,