Nomad Dad & Kid first published on Substack a year ago.
A year ago our home died and we scrambled to find a replacement in time to get on the road and head up to Canada for summer camp. We broke down three hours into the trip back to the greet wet of eastern North America, and again 17 hours from our destination.
Kid had an amazing summer canoe camping in the Ontario wilderness while Nomad Dad got his bell rung while managing a short staffed summer camp kitchen that only serves meals from scratch.
When one zooms out in reflection on experience, it seems that many of the details fall away. One is left with the core of lived experience, distilled down to the challenges met and obstacles climbed and deep compassion for the many, many falling downs.
This spiral dance that is life.
What’s changed?
Kid’s hair color.
Nomad Dad’s deepening understanding of the depths and consequence of his neurodiversity and a lifetime of playing pretend to simulate acceptance.
Kid is growing up fast. More and more it seems their first pair of wheels on a public road will be a International 4300 with a gross vehicle weight rating of 28,500 lbs.
Nomad Dad now publishes this work, along with Green Alchemy and Human Bean Awake. He’s about to pull the trigger on his first fictional work, but that’s all hush-hush until it is real.
Kid had an amazing experience in Ontario at an outpost summer camp on Lake Temagami, and preparations are already underway.
Nomad Dad jumped into holistic healing with both feet, continuing his training as a shamanic practitioner and synergizing everything he has learned into a combination of self-hypnosis, shamanic power retrieval, and liquid compassion.
Our doggo, inFernO, still curls up on the end of the bed. The cats are impatient to get their feet on real ground after a day of traveling. One got hit by a car, fracturing his jaw and causing a traumatic brain injury that took half his eyesight.
The Lorax Roadshow has taken form and a new name, The 100th Monkey Roadshow, is now an event you can book for a workshop or weekend or retreat.
What Has Stayed the Same?
There are two kids in this rig that need parenting. One is Kid and the other is Nomad Dad. I see my role parenting Kid as one who can listen to and see them to the best of my ability and allow them to become, not with the fists and fights and emotional terrorism that I grew up with, instead Kid and Dad co-create a space of empathy and support and guidance and challenge. Kid’s mom passed in 2023 after spending thirteen years in a vegetative state after experiencing cardiac and respiratory arrest, then hypoxia that affected the whole of her physical body.
Nomad Dad comes back for edits and realizes that he dropped a bomb in the first paragraph and promptly changed the subject. What might it take to give ourselves credit for everything we have gone through and done and said in order to survive so that we can thrive?
This overland journey, for Nomad Dad is a healing one. He decided to unpack all his shit and work through it piece by piece and feeling by feeling. In doing so, he has become a power house and resource for others who consciously decide they want more from life than just surviving. This journey has been lifelong, teaching him about psychology, philosophy, value systems, the subconscious roots of feeling, trauma recovery, neurodiversity, and nervous system wiring.
As Kid learns, Nomad Dad learns. Kid is just as much the teacher wherever we find ourselves as Nomad Dad thinks he is. We both get to be just who we are. Nothing more, nothing less.
Zooming out, looking back we see that each of us—even through all of the negative chatter in our brains— has been exactly who we are in each and every moment. And we have the ability to make better decisions based on the lessons of the past, especially when we learn to listen and respond to our feelings instead of reacting to them and taking them out on others.
We are here. Now.
How novel is that. If we are here now, then there is no reason that we have to carry anything from the past into the present. There is no purpose behind justifying catastrophic daydreams of the future. We’re just here. The wind is blowing and there is snow on the peaks of the Gila Wilderness to the northeast, and the flycatchers are back after a winter away.
Here. Now.
Nomad Dad 3.25
The End is the Beginning
We spent six weeks in the desert on the Cali, Arizona line after finding out that our home of three and a half years was permanently wounded with leaf spring and frame issues that would keep her off the road for good.
Hello, I’m Nomad Dad, and I’ve been living on the road with Kid (Senka) since mid-2020 in our converted Red Cross blood donation bus named Totoro, the Spirit of the Forest from the movie by the same name.
In those three and a half years we have traveled extensively, learned experientially, and learned to deal with one another (and three fur babies) in a 300 square foot space designed to spent extended periods off grid.
Where have we been?
Are we talking internally or externally? The internal journey of the past years has been one of healing, reflection and recovery for Nomad Dad. While Senka has been busy growing and learning and making friends all over the country and world, they’ve come to enjoy road life and the freedom from the public school industrial complex. Certainly, there are compromises for both of us, yet on the road we work less, have more fun, and can alter our course whenever we see fit.
When we started this journey, Senka was 11 years old [3.25 - They’re almost 16!]. They were still wee and tentative about getting up on the roof of the bus. They had yet to begin making themselves amazing breakfasts and homeschooling was the battles of battles. During the first six months we traveled extensively and did the fun things. Then, after a break-up, life got real for dad and we learned to shelter in familiar and supportive places for a time.
Since then, we have a pattern. Southwestern New Mexico and Southern Arizona for the winter and summer camp in the Northwoods. It’s a great work-trade. I get paid and Senka gets amazing growth experiences in the woods and on the water. This season, we are headed to Camp Keewaydin in Northern Ontario in the native home of the Bear Island.
The only thing is, we have no idea how we are getting there.
The past few weeks have been a series of firsts. I got to drive a 30,000 lb bus up onto a semi, then back off again in Phoenix, Arizona. We AirBNB hopped our way through central Arizona before getting a second opinion from the mechanic that the bus was irreparable for on-road use. We then shipped the bus to near Silver City, New Mexico where Totoro will reside permanently on a friend’s off-grid homestead and serve as a tiny home.
So, we are safe and well and welcome, and leaning into the uncertainty of what is to come.
So, what is to come?
Living on the road, the lesson that we have the choice to choose free will is ready and apparent. We set our boundaries or fail to everywhere we go. We have the opportunity each day to stand up and accept the reality that we are living and choose or deny it. We know exactly how we got here because we made every single choice together.
New rig | *Soot Sprite*
A rig is a nomad’s ride and home. A rig can be a pickup truck or a 53 foot RV. Most have six wheels, some have four and others have ten. After many, many discussions we have both decided to stay on the road. The sticks and bricks life was ours for a time, and we have come to love new places, faces and experiences that traveling has in abundance.
Donate? You’ve got that right. There is a new mission and purpose for our road travels and we need your support to make it happen. Nomad Dad is a dreamer and sometimes an idealist, hence spending nearly 20 years in organic vegetable and cut flower farming.
Nomad Dad learned some things in his time farming. He learned how to be in relationship with the Earth in some profound ways. Then he became a certified hypnotist and developed what he’s tentatively calling “100th Monkey Roadshow” that with experiential learning with hypnosis, groups can learn to renew their relationship with the Earth, each other, and themselves.
We are but simple human beans, yet together we have the ability to move mountains. . . we just forgot how to for a millennia.
How is that Purpose and Direction Changing?
With the death of our self-built, DIY nomadic home, we are facing some changes. In those changes are opportunities to learn from past experience and make adjustments as Nomad Dad jumps from a career in farming into writing and holistic health and well being as a primary income source. Senka is no longer a little kiddo and will be 15 the day before the summer solstice. Times have changed and so must our new rig.
Nomad Dad is also a certified hypnotist, specializing in group work and teaching self-hypnosis. He uses a combination of subconscious liberation that is entwined with experiential learning in consciousness. That means that he is a guide to your own explorations in consciousness. Part of this exploration in consciousness is teaching others, experientially how to reconnect to their relationship with the Earth.
Similarly, Nomad Dad works with a core group of amazing humans in development and advocacy with the One Living System where the group is in process as all of us human beans get wise to building a world we want to live in, in collaboration with the natural systems and cycles on which we collectively depend.
Our Rules of the Road
Over the years and miles my kid and I have developed a way of being that allows us to be humans that share a small space. While growth mindset and resourcing and boundaries have been subjects of discussion and home-school and occasional scowls, the fact of the matter is that we live in a small space. Sometimes mutual respect and check-in’s help more than anything.
The ‘Rules’:
All decisions are made collectively, many times by consensus
We give each other space when needed
We eat when we feel like it
We strive to acknowledge and listen to our feelings and the needs they are motivating us to meet
We will call each other out on our bullshit
We have a six hour a day driving maximum
Our Purpose and Direction
To learn experientially and to encourage innate gifts to express themselves
To honor our feelings and needs, enabling our authenticity
To make time and space for acknowledging grief, loss, resentment, betrayal, shame and fear. The past does not have to exist in the present in the form of triggers, silence, self-abdication, or rigid rule structures.
Seeking and finding our tribe of positive, growth mindset folks that live in relationship with the Earth.
To spread the good word that the Earth needs us. She really, really does. Our support, trust, belonging and love are not so small that they could not be extended to the trees and rocks and waters we find ourselves driving over at 70 mph everyday. We live in reciprocity on this planet. Our (and her) natural state is balance. The personal and collective liberation from the lies, betrayals, manipulation and control of a system of being that we inherited by birth is up for renewal?
Where do we start once that potential for liberation is grasp in our awareness? We learn to become empowered human beans with agency in our lives. Agency, in part, means acknowledging that we are interdependent with the living systems of this planet. When that love goes out to the woods and waters and vistas, it has no choice but to come back to the sender.
We live in a mirror. Our inner lives are reflected back to us in our external perception.