Into the Unknown
Prototyping Our Place: What Co-Living & Regenerative Spaces Might Tell Us About Home, Identity, Companionship and Belonging.
Read last month's
— as it’s part of a series of exploring who, what, and where to call “home” during poly-crisis and the transformation of our species.Hit that ❤️ button as it helps us create algorithmic magic together.
“There’s a thousand reasons I should go about my day / and ignore your whispers, which I wish would go away...”
Same, Elsa, same.
Lately, I’ve been hearing those whispers too—not from a cartoon spirit, but from somewhere deeper. Something older than logic. Something that is coming to the forefront of my insight, instinct, and intuition. A signal not shouting, but humming beneath the noise. It’s a familiar feeling. That pulse in the chest. The sense that something is about to shift.
Fostering Dreams of Who, What, and Where to Call Home
Since I was eight years old and got my curious little hands on a glossy Lufthansa magazine, I’ve had an unreasonable love for Europe. The architecture, the train lines, the languages I couldn’t speak but somehow understood—something in it felt like it was part of my future, and somehow echoed from my past.
That intuition proved true. For the last decade, I’ve been living across this continent. Amsterdam. Hamburg. Milan. A few dreamy stops in between. Before that, it was cities like LA and New York. I’ve always been urban. Fast-moving. Adaptable. Accelerated.
And yet, for all the nomadic movement, I’ve rarely felt settled. I’ve never lived in one place for more than a few years (or months) at a time.
My sense of home? Still under construction.
That’s no surprise to those who know my story. I grew up in a dozen different homes before the age of 18. I was emancipated and declared an adult by the court at age 16. As an adult, I still struggle with knowing how to really take care of myself or provide a stable home.
At age 21, I inherited my beloved Heath family (feel free to read my mother’s Substack
). They have taught me what it means to belong and how far unconditional love can carry one as unteathered as me—yet I’m still learning what family even means twenty years later. For me, “home” has never been a fixed point on a map. It’s been a question of meaning I’ve carried like a compass, spinning.I share this story in a video I made for the Miracle Foundation - an organization that is focused on other people’s children becoming all our children, and is responsible for shifting the narrative from finding a home for a child, to creating a thriving one to keep them in.
If you’ve ever wondered why I care so much about community, it’s all right there: the instability of my past has made me relentlessly devoted to helping others find grounding, belonging, meaning, and continuity.
And yet, here we are—2025—and I find myself once again between places, between stories. Like many of you, I’m navigating this strange, in-between era:
Global systems are breaking down. The cost of living is rising. The job market is fragmenting. AI is rewriting the rules of a post-reality paradigm. Whole industries are folding. Governments are shifting to protect themselves with authoritarinism, while people are forced to cross borders they never wanted to leave in the first place. And it’s becoming more apparent by the day that we are not alone among the stars, and yet are own planet and people are suffering.
Since COVID and the rapid rise of remote working, we are seeing a world of nomads emerging. Not the kind who choose the open road for wanderlust, but the kind displaced by collapsing systems, burned-out dreams, drowning in the complexity of transformation, or the simple inability to afford a stable roof, a nurturing community, or even keep food on the table.
At the same time, nationalism is rising. Borders are tightening. Refugees, immigrants, and even expats are demonized. And something primal is being stirred—our search for safety, identity, sanctuary.
So where do we go?
Where do I go?
A Place Where The Whole is Greater Than The Sum of Its Parts
This past August, after two years of midwifing a vision, my co-founder, Sebastien Dumont, and I finally ran our pilot EMERGE —an immersive experience tucked inside a digital-free monastery in the Umbrian hills of Italy.
It was an experiment in what happens when you strip everything down and reconnect with what’s essential: nature, soul, body, mind, and community, rooted in biomimicry, indigenous wisdom, inner science, and communal curation. And from there, a deeper truth revealed itself:
If we want to live different lives, we must live in different places.
Not just geographically—but within ourselves, relationally, energetically, consciously.
We were a group of 13 leaders, along with the incredible “monks” of Eremito, living, breathing, and re-learning how to be human together. No phones. No feeds. Just real talk. Real stillness. Real spirit.
That experience changed me profoundly. It quieted the noise just long enough for a new signal to come through. And the signal said: Land. Root. Build.
Not as a lone wolf. But in a new kind of tribe. One that manages resources together, invests in architecture and systems that nourish our inner landscapes, cares for the next generation, heals intergenerational trauma, and makes meaning in a world that’s desperately trying to sell you everything but that.
Many Are Called, Few Choose
My exploration of co-living or regeneration isn’t really starting as a plan—but as a longing.
A longing for coherence, continuity, consciousness, and companionship that the modern world rarely makes space for. That longing first took root during my time supporting Smarthoods, where I was introduced to regenerative living systems—where food, water, waste, and energy weren’t afterthoughts, but the very pride of a self-organized, self-reliant, sovereign home. Leading like nature, and leaving a legacy like a cell.
One of the voices in this space I’ve recently been exploring is
which explores the deeper patterns and poetics of place-making. This work offers a beautiful invitation to see home not just as shelter, but as a field of resonance—where design, ecology, memory, and human need converge to shape who we become.This lens—alongside many others in the growing ecosystem—is helping me shape how to see that this next chapter isn’t about lifestyle or real estate. It’s about creating living systems that remember us as much as we remember them.
That’s the heart of placemaking for me. And that’s the blueprint I’m seeking to prototype—one that’s inclusive, regenerative, and repeatable, so others can follow… or find themselves within it.
I had a glimpse of what’s possible at Villa Gaia, a Tuscan convergence hub for new Earth visionaries: Listen to the full podcast, Instead of Bunkers, Let’s Build Arcs.
My time there was more than a visit—it was an encounter. A place built with intention, rhythm, futurism, inclusion, and humility.
Now, I’m yearning to wander again, but not be lost, which brings up all kinds of scary feelings that transitions do. Goodbyes and hellos, who I really am, and what I really want in between. One thing I can count on is my consistent curation of community, embedded in my DNA.
I’m not just looking at how these spaces behave. I am planning to spend the next months compiling the elements that brought to life co-living models like Alpiness, Frilingue, Vermont Hub, and possibly Terra Rosa, a queer ashram in Spain.
I’ll be listening for a replicable blueprint to share with others, particularly Gen Z and the younger generations who might be interested in doing the same. To piece together answers to many of their frustrations and limitations — the burdens they inherited from our shortsightedness, or rather, capitulation to a corrosive system that we allowed to flourish under our watch.
What holds community together when novelty fades?
What rituals, systems, and agreements shape the invisible architecture of belonging?
What design choices generate harmony, not just efficiency?
Because this journey is not about individual lifestyle—it’s about collective placemaking.
Placemaking: Where Spirit Meets Structure
Placemaking is more than real estate. It’s the art and practice of shaping space into a container for shared meaning. It’s where architecture meets aliveness. Where values take form in kitchens, courtyards, and compost bins. How we manage between ownership and access, autonomy and interdependence.
In contrast to top-down development, placemaking is participatory. It’s not something you build for people—it’s something you build with them. It’s about listening to land, culture, and community—and designing with care.
Placemaking asks:
What story does this place want to tell?
Who is it for, and who does it forget?
How do we create spaces that hold grief, joy, ceremony, creativity, and rest?
For me, the next experiment is to co-create a queer-inclusive, spiritually grounded, ecologically aligned campus. Not just a co-living space—but a learning ground. A pilot for others to follow.
Imagine one of the many fading villages in Italy, or the Alps—like Albinen—reimagined as a regenerative homebase for the future. Not gated. Not exclusive. But deeply curated. A place where resumes are irrelevant, and resonance is everything. Where personal currency flows beyond equality, into equity, not by quantity of what you can exchange, but the quality of your BEING brings to that place. Like family.
This won’t be built overnight. And others are already doing it. It’s also messy, but it’s emerging—with story, with soil, with the stars above, and with soul below.
I haven’t leaped yet, but I am listening to the whispers coming. The familiar restlessness is turning into something more grounded. Not urgency. But direction.
And in the background of that stillness, I keep seeing one place. Nestled high in the Valais region of Switzerland, near Zermatt, which has long been to me like an ancient friend. It’s not where I am, but where I feel most remembered. Most intact. Most... tuned in.
There’s a kind of intelligence in those mountains—a hum that doesn’t require translation. I’ve returned to them again and again over the years without ever fully understanding why. Only now am I beginning to see it:
I’m not chasing escape.
I’m choosing sanctuary.
Not just for me. But for others, too.
What I long to create—perhaps in Valais, perhaps somewhere else equally alive—is not just a house or a hub, but a shared space of being.
A conscious experience.
A place for connectors, builders, elders, youth.
A place for queer folks and edge-dwellers.
A place that listens to the anthropocene—and the algorithm.
A place where presence becomes architecture.
I don’t have it all figured out. But I do know this: Something is calling me.
And it starts with rethinking what “home” even means. Not just four walls and a mortgage. But continuity. Kinship. Stewardship. Soul.
If you’re hearing that call too—if you’ve felt the nudge to leave the noise and come build something sacred—then let’s keep talking. Leave a comment, or share this with someone who might be hearing these same whispers as Elsa and me.
We’re all going into the unknown.
But at least we don’t have to go there alone.
This Substack has been brought to you by the inspiration of the likes of some of my fellow writers in this space: