What we came to Sweden for

What a roller coaster the end of 2023 has been!

Hello everyone, and Happy New Year to all of you ✨🤎

I am finally back on my keyboard trying to summarize, yet again, too many things into what I want to make a simple newsletter.

It’s a dark January evening, and I am sitting in a corner of our new house, by the fireplace. This year started with moving out of the place where we lived for the past two years and starting again in our dream house, which is located in a new little town, away from what has been the nucleus of our lives in Sweden since we arrived.

This change feels like a breath of fresh air. We were never really comfortable at the place where we lived before. Our landlord was around all the time and we felt like we had no privacy at all. To be honest, from where we are now, it’s hard for me to understand why we stayed there for such a long time. It was cheap. Very cheap, and that was one of the main reasons for us to push through the discomfort we were feeling. But around late September, Silvia and I once had a conversation and we realized we were stuck. The energy felt paralyzed, and it was affecting how we felt and touching every other area of our lives.

That’s when we knew it was time for change. We knew we needed to get moving and look for somewhere where we could feel at home. Almost five months after this realization, and with the start of the new year, we have accomplished our old dream of living in a house surrounded by forest and nature. After we found this house, opportunities started to sprout everywhere, and they came in the form of shorter distances to civilization, great job opportunities, peace, privacy, and freedom. This was another example of what happens when one activates change in life. It works like magic ✨

I have no words to describe how thankful I feel, and yet how odd it still is to know that this wonderful place is now our home.

Moving has been hectic in every sense of the word. With December being so busy at work, preparing to move out during Christmas, and the beautiful but not-recommended-when-moving Swedish winter weather we’ve had, I have a sense of not having processed what 2023 has meant for me yet.

Here are some photos from our move. Thankfully we had my dad and brother helping us.

Starting this year I felt like 2023 hadn’t been a very prolific year, as if I hadn’t accomplished enough. I would have loved to upload more videos, shoot more photos, to write more newsletters. Only today I really see that going inwards this year has been crucial for me to be able to go on. I’ve come into 2024 lighter, having shed many layers that weren’t mine.

In 2023 I plunged into what it means to be a woman, something that I will continue to explore moving forward. Having to give this some thought may sound stupid, but for me, it’s not. Creating memories of birth for women and deciding to host a women's circle has fulfilled a need there was in me to explore these intimate and womanly territories, which has brought up a lot of inspiration, and also hurt and anger. I had never fully seen the gap between what it means to be a woman and what we have to become to fit in the society we’ve built.

Trying to understand what it means to become a mother has made me get in touch with the child in me, and allowed that part of me to speak up about what once hurt. Actually, and I know it sounds cliché, but it is because of that hurt that I am here today. Not only because I had to fix myself, but because now I know where my will to improve the situations for children and women comes from. That’s part of the seeds of the lifetime project that I am building, and it makes perfect sense for me now.

I get great vibes from moving into 2024. My 2023 has been full of beautiful moments. I could cross “documenting a birth” off my bucket list. I actually documented two, and I plan to document many more in the coming years.

2024 started forcefully, and it looks like it’s going to continue like this. I am going back to my home town in Spain for a couple of weeks in February. It’ll be the first time I go back after almost three years in Sweden. Confronting the place where I lived most of my life is going to be interesting after having been away for quite some time. I was always critical about the place where I grew up. I know it has its strengths, and this time I would love to see them as if I were someone coming from a different part of the world. We’ll see how that goes!

Thank you all for reading until here, and thank you 2023 for everything and everyone you brought into my life.

I am wishing you peace and self-love in 2024.

With love ✨🤎

Paloma 🕊️