The Audacity to Dream

BGCL Newsletter

Hi there, it’s Hillarie! Rewilding Mind is space where I share my transformation from leaving modern city living to embracing a slower pace of life in the country. Read on for ideas on returning to nature, finding ourselves, and creating community. 💚

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Hey friends,

Recently, I’ve been thinking about dreaming and the places that dreams have taken me through my lifetime. And not just any dreams—big, impossible, too-good-to-be-true, not-meant-for-a-girl-like-me dreams. You might call them audacious dreams.

Audacious dreams shaped the trajectory of my life and carried me to the place I have landed today. Dreaming has allowed me to speed up when my youthful energy could match the demands of that lifestyle. Dreams have allowed me to slow down when I needed to catch my breath, gain some perspective, and redefine success.

For most of my formative years, I dreamed of escaping my quiet life in the rural Midwest for a fast, slick, and fun life in the city. I breathed life into that dream until I found myself in front of board rooms full of executives at one of the biggest tech companies in the world. I had dreamed it into existence. After over a decade of break-neck speeds, I dreamed of a slower, more intentional pace. That too I dreamed into being.

But none of my dreaming took place in a vacuum, that is a fact. It started by leaning into and believing the big dreams of people around me. By honoring and cherishing the bold, yet delicate dreams of others. When I saw people I loved dream, it gave me permission to do the same.

Dreaming is in My Blood

My father grew up in the projects in Baltimore and integrated a wealthy white elementary school in 1962, when he was in the first grade. To his surprise, the school library had books on the shelves and classrooms of engaged, happy students. Though his enrollment only lasted a few weeks, it allowed him to craft a dream of a life beyond the squalor and depression of the poverty he lived in.

His young teen mother struggled with addiction, his father spent years in prison, and neither had the emotional capacity to love and nurture a young Black boy during the height of the Civil Rights era. He had glimpses of loving households on occasional visits to extended family, and it left him dreaming of a different way to raise a family. He would eventually leave what little he had for the Job Corps, then join the Air Force, determined to travel the world and capture his dream.

My mother grew up on a farm in South Dakota and was marked from an early age as less capable. All because she was left-handed and suffered a terrible virus as a young child that reset her to infancy. She regained her health and was known to be a brilliant, feisty young girl. Any doubt people had about her abilities fueled a dream to be something more than what women of her time and place were allowed to be.

Standing in flowing fields of wheat, she watched planes fly overhead, wondering who sat on the plane gazing down at her and where they were going. She dreamed of one day being on one–of being someone, flying somewhere. As soon as she was eligible, she joined the Air Force. At last, she sat on those planes and looked down at the patchwork of fields blanketing the prairie, wondering who was looking back up at her.

Learning to be Audacious

The first time I recall the thrill of audacious dreams was in third grade. I was a pudgy Black girl living in South Dakota, and all I wanted to do was blend in. I towered at least a foot above my best friend, an astute and witty brown-haired, blue-eyed girl that had moved from California a year before. One day while pumping our legs on the playground swings, she casually mentioned that she was going to be an astronaut, and my mind was blown. How on earth would this little girl from South Dakota get into space? But I loved her dream, I loved her bravery, and I believed she could do it.

In 2000, my brother dropped out of his first year at a technical school in South Dakota. He was a self-taught programmer at a young age and dreamed of heading west to a little port city where a small tech company named Microsoft was making some waves. He dreamed of breaking into this emerging industry, and I knew he could do it. Years later, he was living that dream and he told me that one day he wanted to be in the C-suit at a major tech company. A bold statement, but I loved his dream. Today, he is a leader at Google, an expert in his field, and he has never stopped dreaming.

Dreaming was what attracted me to my now husband. He was a worldly young man with big eyes, a big heart, and even bigger dreams. His Nigerian and Jewish family were all living out their own audacious dreams, and he had been taking notes. On our first date, he regaled me with stories about his entrepreneurial pursuits and I was so excited to tell my friends that I had snagged a real business man. At the time, he successfully designed, marketed, and sold an iPad case, and had dreams to expand into more accessories and apps. I believed him and I wanted every bit of that dream for him.

Dreaming of Fast

A few years into my career, I had moved from Seattle to Silicon Valley—the epicenter of fast. It was the early 2010s, and at the time, it was impossible not to be whisked into big, audacious, impossible dreams that filled the air. I lived and breathed those dreams everyday, witnessing ideas that once felt impossible manifesting in real life–electric vehicles, medical cures, and apps for any problem you could imagine.

I moved to the Bay Area with dreams of accelerating my career in Learning & Development, and working for a company that would pay my way through graduate school. I managed to land a good job at the first biotech company in the world, and they were glad to pay my way through graduate school—as long as I could keep up with the dogged pace of work. I worked and studied nonstop for two years. After graduating, I dreamed of winding down my California dream to return to the PNW.

By the time we returned to Seattle, it had become a junior version of the tech city we just departed. My husband’s career in design was just taking off, and I still had some energy left to grow my own career, even with a young son. This time, I wanted to see if I could hang with the tech bros, and I always dreamed of having an office in a shiny tower downtown. I got the gig, hung with the bros, and after a few long years, I felt like I had nothing left to prove. I was ready to downshift my life and dream in a new direction altogether—I was ready for slow. 

Creating a Vision of Slow

Some years earlier, my husband and I spent weeks piecing together a collage poster of all the things we wanted for ourselves. (Oh, the ways you can spend time when you don’t have kids.) At the time we were newlyweds, and we had no idea what life would bring us next. We had high hopes of what we could build together and we wanted to create a vision for what it could be.

We brought home lifestyle magazines that spoke to our highest aspirations and scoured them, looking for visuals of the life we imagined for ourselves. Together we curated an artistic rendering of the places we wanted to visit, inspirational quotes, joyful young families, and houses that we would love to call our home. We gravitated towards simple, modern spaces that felt warm inside, and with outsides that felt lush and alive.

Could we afford to buy a home? Nope. Did we know how to build an A-frame treehouse? Certainly not. Did we have any reason to believe that this life was even a possibility? Kinda. Because everything we were living was the result of being willing to dream beyond what the world told us was possible.

We stepped back to admire this vision of a time and place in our future. None of it looked like a life we could have while living in the city. There was a clear dissonance between the visual we had created and the life we were currently pursuing, but we thought nothing of it. If we dreamed audaciously, one day, some day it would come to be.

Making the Dream a Reality

The dream of slow country living began to emerge in the summer of 2020—peak pandemic months. After a few years of living with my in-laws, we had saved enough money for a down payment on a home, but certainly no home in or around Seattle. We started to make day trips out of the city, searching for locations that felt like an accessible escape. We drove each major highway leaving the city and decided North through Skagit Valley was where we wanted to be.

The first home we viewed had all the custom wood details we craved in a home and an incredible speaker system throughout that exceeded the dreams of my audiophile husband. I tried to imagine my little family living in this lovely house on a steep hill, with loads of natural light coming through the windows. My daydream caved when my young toddler started slamming the class cupboard doors and I had to run down the narrow set of stairs before we triggered the “you break it, you buy it” policy. This was not the house.

A week later, a house came on the market that met all of our criteria and offered more land than we had imagined. It was located on an island, just under 2 hours from the city. Feeling like this could be the one, my mother-in-law and I took a trip out to see the property. Everything about it felt right, though the color was awful. Without stepping foot in the home, we made an offer and it was accepted.

The months that followed felt anything but dreamy. We were ignorant new home owners with zero idea of how to take care of a home, let alone an acre of land. As we slowly emptied our room in Seattle, we uncovered our vision board. Like a scene out of a movie, we stared at the images that we had compiled years prior. It was uncanny how much the photos on the collage matched our new home. The idea had become a reality—our audacious dream had come true.

Next week, I will share about how my dream has grown and evolved since moving to the country. Until then, drop a message to let me know: What does your slow living dream look and feel like? Simply hit reply to share with me directly or share it with the BGCL community via the Substack page. 

Thanks for taking time to slow down and be present with me this week. Take care, be kind, and we'll talk soon,

Hillarie