On unexpected endings, second chapters, seven Scottish Terriers and the gloriously unfinished business of figuring out what comes next.
Well, this is awkward.
You know when you have a plan? A reasonably good one, or so you thought. You’ve worked hard, built things, made a home, imagined a future and generally assumed that, despite the occasional disaster, life would continue moving in kind of the right direction.
And then life looks at your carefully constructed plans, laughs hysterically and throws the whole bloody lot out the window.
Yes. That.
Welcome to Untamed Nomad.
That’s me, I’m Erica. I’ve lived several very different lives already, and it would appear I’m about to embark on another one. This is absolutely not where I expected to find myself at fifty, but here we are.
Now, you might be expecting a story about someone who decided to throw caution to the wind, sell everything and set off in search of adventure. I wish I could tell you it was all that romantic. The truth is, life made a few decisions for me before I had much chance to make my own.
A few lives before this one
I’ve always been good at having ideas. Some have been brilliant. Some not so much. Quite a few have made money, others have cost me a fortune, and several have involved considerably more mud than I originally anticipated.
I’ve built businesses, created things, written a book, kept animals, grown food, welcomed guests and worked ridiculous hours, but I’ve never wondered whether a nice sensible job might have been a better idea. I’ve always loved what I do, even when things have been difficult, and for a long time I was genuinely happy with the life I’d created.
Until I made one fatal mistake that put an end to it all.
For some of you, I won’t be a complete stranger. You might remember me as The Woman That Farms, a wonderful chapter of my life that grew into a business, a community and a collection of stories about living and working differently. I loved all of what I created, learned an enormous amount along the way, and there are parts of that life I will always treasure.
But that chapter ended almost four years ago. Not neatly, not gracefully, and certainly not according to plan.
There have been other chapters since. Some wonderful, some difficult, and a few I wouldn’t be in a hurry to repeat. I’m not going to squeeze all of them into one blog post. We’d be here until Christmas, and frankly, I think we’ve all got better things to do.
There will be time for those stories.
The strange thing about starting again
One of the strangest things about starting over is discovering that you don’t actually want everything you had before.
For a while, I think it’s natural to measure life against what you’ve lost. The home you had, the business you built, the version of the future you thought was waiting for you. You spend so much time thinking about how things used to be that it’s easy to forget to ask yourself whether that life is still the one you want.
But eventually another question begins to creep in.
Do I actually really want to go back?
You begin to realise that you’ve built it once. It meant something then, but does it still mean the same thing now? People change, circumstances change, and perhaps the things we wanted ten years ago aren’t necessarily the things that will make us happy today.
What if, instead of spending the next chapter trying to recreate the last one, I could take everything I’ve learned and do something different? Not necessarily bigger or grander, just more interesting, more independent and more my own.
I haven’t suddenly developed a perfect understanding of life, by the way. I’m still learning, still making mistakes and occasionally wondering what on earth I’m doing. I do have plans, quite ambitious ones as it happens, but I’ve also learned that plans are only useful until life comes along with a better idea. Sometimes you’ve just got to change direction, work with what you’ve got and see where it takes you.
So, what exactly is Untamed Nomad?
That’s a good question.
After almost four years on the road, I decided the name Untamed Nomad suited me pretty well.
Now, this is a story for another day, but for those who don’t already know, when I lost everything, the Scotties and I found ourselves homeless. I was faced with a choice: give up my beloved clan and seek council accommodation, or find another way. Neither giving up my dogs nor going down the council route was an option I was prepared to consider, so I did what I’ve always done when life presents me with an impossible situation. I found another way.
For a couple of months, the Scotties and I slept rough in the forests and hills of Scotland. A bit like camping, I suppose, except there’s nothing particularly romantic about trying to get through a Scottish winter when the temperature drops to minus ten degrees. February was brutal, and there were times when simply getting through another night was an achievement in itself.
Eventually, a friend discovered the situation we were in and did something I’ll never forget. They gave us a large caravan to live in. After weeks of uncertainty, we finally had somewhere warm and dry to sleep, somewhere to put our belongings and, most importantly, somewhere all seven dogs could stay together.
That caravan became our home, and it’s still our home today. It might not have been the life I’d planned, but it gave us something incredibly important: a place to begin again.
So when the name Untamed Nomad came to me, it just seemed to fit. Not because I’d set out to live some wonderfully adventurous, unconventional life, but because circumstances had taken me somewhere I never expected to be, and somehow I’d found a way to keep going.
In essence, that’s exactly what we are.
And that’s how this little corner of the internet began.
The Untamed Nomad Blog.
It’s partly a journal, partly a collection of ideas, projects, adventures and beautiful things, and partly an experiment in creating a life that feels like my own again.
There will be stories about starting over, making money, finding freedom and occasionally getting things a bit wrong. There will be gardening, cooking, old houses, wild places, interesting finds, books, handmade things and probably more creative projects than any sensible person should attempt simultaneously. There will be things to make, things to learn and, eventually, things to buy.
And, of course, there are the Scottish Terriers.
Seven of them.
If you’ve ever lived with a Scottie, you’ll understand why this immediately rules out any possibility of a peaceful, orderly existence. If you haven’t, you’ll learn.
They’re my constant companions, and I’d have been utterly lost without them. When the shit hit the fan, those seven little dogs gave me a reason to keep going, even on the days when I couldn’t see much of a way forward.
Then there’s Molly, my daughter, who’s been alongside me through more twists and turns than either of us could have imagined. She’s a huge part of my life, and I suspect she’ll have plenty to say about some of the ideas I come up with along the way!
Some days we’ll talk about the serious stuff. Other days we might make a particularly good supper, discover something wonderful in a second-hand shop or spend an unreasonable amount of time talking about my beloved Scottie Clan.
Because that’s life, isn’t it? Not one continuous inspirational speech, but a mixture of the ordinary and extraordinary, the ridiculous and the difficult, the beautiful and the bloody inconvenient.
And I like it that way.
The unfinished chapter
I could wait until everything is sorted before beginning this. Until I have the perfect home, the finished website, the thriving business, the beautiful photographs and a suitably impressive success story to tell. But I’ve spent enough of my life waiting for things to be just right.
Besides, I think the interesting part might be what happens between here and there. The figuring things out, the experiments, the mistakes and the small victories we should all share and be proud of, because they’re the things that keep us heading in the right direction. Those moments when something that seemed impossible suddenly starts to look possible after all.
So that’s where we’re beginning. Not at the end of the story, with everything neatly tied up, but right in the middle of it.
I have absolutely no intention of pretending that the difficult bits haven’t happened, and I’ll no doubt spend some time talking about them. They’re part of the story, after all. But I don’t sit in the past and dwell on it. Life has moved on, and so have I. Eventually, I realised that some of those changes might actually have been for the better.
There’s far too much I still want to do, and I suspect there are quite a few of you out there who feel the same.
Perhaps you’ve had to change direction. Perhaps the life you carefully planned no longer fits. Or perhaps everything is going perfectly well, but you’ve started wondering whether there might be something a little more interesting around the next corner.
Whatever brought you here, you’re very welcome.
Pull up a chair. Make yourself a cup of tea.
Welcome to Untamed Nomad.
Apparently, Plan A was terribly overrated.
