A Simpler Life
Living in community has always been a longing of my heart. The kind of community who knows things about you that no one else knows, and loves you just the same. Not just checking in occasionally to maintain friend status, but real, messy, authentic, do-life-together kind of community, where you share a garden and break bread together on the regular.
Within a year of mine & Matt’s marriage, we somehow managed to downsize from a one bedroom apartment into a 24 foot airstream travel trailer. We spent that first summer touring the Deep South, making music & documenting our travels, then continued to call those wheels home where we parked on our friend's 40 acre homestead. A year and a half later, I found out I was pregnant and decided maybe a camper wasn’t the best place to bring home a baby. So, naturally, we threw our clothes in the car one night and moved into my parents spare bedroom, where we had planned to live for a short season while we house hunted on a laughably small budget. I never intended to bring my baby home to that spare bedroom, and I certainly didn’t plan on sharing that bed with him for the first seven months of his life. But life is funny, sometimes.
We searched tirelessly for land and houses for rent all over the area, and eventually ended up in the house next door to my parents. It was a tiny fixer-upper that my parents saw potential in, and managed to snag before it ever got put on the market. So the next month was spent recovering old shiplap, adding more shiplap, and opening up the kitchen, (all things Joanna Gaines would have wanted for us). Finally, we wrote our parent’s a check for November’s rent and felt like Kings in a gargantuan castle. It was one of those instances where God was clearly saying, “bloom where you are planted.” So, we did.
Several months after our move, God and life circumstance created an opportunity for our best friends to move into the house directly behind us, meaning we now all shared a backyard. And over the course of the next few days, you will hear stories told from Amber and Jana highlighting God's sense of humor & wonderfully mysterious ways.
“The Space We Share” is an ode to the literal ground on which we play, eat, sit by the fire, raise chickens, plant vegetables and coexist. It is a collection of our stories in this sweet season of life that God has so graciously given us. But it is also an invitation into a less transient space—a global community of women who are tired of the solitude and the constant comparison. We want to invite you into this small corner of life, where we share our struggles, successes, and dreams, in hopes that somewhere along our journey, you will be inspired to do the same.
xo,
Alyssa