Our Roots
In October of 2011, Beana was sitting with her project team in a conference room in Dubai looking at the calendar for the year ahead. In that moment, she knew with precision where she would be every month for the next 13 months of her life. New York. Austria. China. Brazil. Hong Kong. Thailand. Mexico City. Portugal. New York. Paris. Switzerland. Colombia. Austria, back to China then New York, and around again. She was helping to build a global infrastructure to assist a sales team to influence supply chains for the luxury fashion brand Swarovski. The goal was to sell more crystal and bring sparkle to the world’s leading fashion, jewelry and architectural brands.
Beana had already been living in a hotel over Hong Kong for the 2 years prior, in Austria’s Inn Valley for 4 years before that, in NYC for 9 years and traveling internationally every month for about 4 years, but something about that day in Dubai struck her differently. She could see the Arabian Sea through the tinted glass of the board room, but she felt a million miles away from the ocean, from the Earth and from herself.
She returned to Brooklyn after that meeting on a quest to recover her sense of self and her connection to something more meaningful than her professional identity and expense account. She had “succeeded” by society’s standards (and her Dad’s as well) but she felt empty, lonely and keenly aware that she was missing something big. Beana spent more time in the park down the street, invested in house plants, began a yoga practice and planned a trip north to Vermont to ground herself in nature, reconnect with old friends and catch her breath. Though she was trying to cultivate a meaningful connection with nature and spirit, it was challenging in the over-stimulated, commerce-centric, concrete jungles of the world. It was clear that she needed to change her life.
She had lived in Vermont many years prior and always maintained a romantic nostalgia for how life felt there. ‘Freedom and Unity’ is Vermont’s state motto and that dichotomy always resonated with her since she saw Vermont to be a land of polarities. . .old fashioned yet progressive, freeing yet rooted in community, dynamic but grounded by the seasons and traditions.
The tensions between these characteristics seemed to produce intelligent discourse, authentic activism, boundless creativity, a tapestry of community, old school work ethic, reverence for real food and farmers, and an honest connection to Earth throughout the intensely different and beautiful seasons. The same way you can taste the terroir of a place in its cheese or wine rings true for life as well. There’s an earthy, lush depth to life in the Green Mountain State and, for Beana, it’s been a balm, a healing tonic and potent reminder of what matters most in this life.
Fast forward five years: Beana is living in a mountaintop log cabin 2,250’ above sea level overlooking the boreal forests of Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom on the north facing slope of Beach Hill. Nestled among 10 forested acres, she is now weaving her worldly ways into a beautifully simple homestead and gathering space. Here on this hill she is redefining comfort and luxury, re-calibrating values, reimagining resilience, and recreating recreation. The ‘lifestyle medicine’ that Beana now practices and shares is what has brought her home to herself and what she feels most called to share.
The crumbling of the patriarchy, the rise of the divine feminine, and the radical honesty with which we can now confront human supremacy, white supremacy and gender supremacy, among other forms of xenophobia, bigotry and cowardice, are upsides to the change taking place. But the activists, allies, survivors, servants, teachers, students, healers and agents of this change, though they may be comforted by the reckoning, are still in need of a soft place to land - to rest , renew, reconnect and re-engage. After years of inhabiting a materialist value system that felt (and still feels) incongruous with her instincts and detrimental to our collective well-being, she’s set out on a journey to rediscover what comforted her, what nurtured her, what grounded her, what inspired her to give her best self to the people around her and what stopped her own inner compass from spinning her dizzy. Sometimes the most complex questions have the simplest answers. For Beana, it was returning to nature, reconnecting to spirit and re-imagining how to live in this world in a way that is generative, gentle and in harmony.