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Brittany L. Bergman

Savoring motherhood, building marriage, and living simply

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The Challenges of Roots, Wings, and Defining This Blog

Feb 5 Leave a Comment

I realize that my first post was a sweeping, fly-over introduction of the concept behind this blog and my own heart. Quite a big task for a single post, and I kind of feel like I need to breathe deeply into a paper bag, as it is now public and I’m really doing this whole blogging thing. To be honest, I felt more fear and vulnerability after I shared that post than I did before I took the leap. Thanks to all of you who read that first piece and offered up your kind words. It means so much to me.

As I was writing that first post, idea after idea pinballed around in my head, threatening to jump out onto my keyboard if I didn’t stay focused. There’s so much depth that I wasn’t able to share in the scope of just 1200 words.

I jotted down many of these ideas and decided that these first several posts will be like continued parts of an introduction. Here are some of the initial questions I’ll cover:

  • Why The Nested Nomad? (Welcome to this post!)
  • What do I mean by travel and adventure? (2 part series)
  • How do I define simplicity and minimalism?

What’s This Blog Even About?

At this point you may be asking yourself: Is this a blog about simplicity or travel or living in tents? Is this woman going to sell everything she owns and live in the desert? Does she think I need to sell everything I own and live in the desert?!  (Here’s the short answer: simplicity and travel; no; no.)

Here’s the medium version: The Nested Nomad is a blog about living simply, consciously, and adventurously wherever I am.

And here is the longer version:

Many months ago, a friend of mine asked a table full of people (most of whom were over the age of 45), “What’s the one thing you always wish you could do more of?” Every single person said they would travel more often. Many of them added that they wished they had made travel a priority in their lives from when they were young.

They didn’t say they would have worked more hours to be able to pay for better vacations. They simply wished they had made travel a priority in how they spent their available time and money over other things.

I don’t want to look back on my life and have the same regret. I don’t want to think of travel as something we can do “one day” when we have more money, when the kids are older, when we retire, insert-other-excuses-here. There will always be a reason not to travel. But I don’t want those reasons to stop us from doing what we love and believe to be valuable.

That said, Dan and I definitely not swimming in money. We rent an apartment. We have sizable student loan debt. We drive modest cars and are working to pay them off. We eat Paleo (except when we’re on vacation or we have a Groupon for pizza or any number of other excuses), so we spend a little more than the average American at the grocery store. We live in the suburbs of Chicago, which are not exactly known for their low cost of living. We cheerfully tithe to our local church and many missionaries and organizations that we care about deeply.

But early in our marriage, all of this led us to feel strapped and discouraged that we wouldn’t be able to keep up with the purchases we saw many other people making.

Reality check: Dan and I each make more than $34,000 per year, which puts us—individually—in the top 1% of the world.

There is no acceptable reason for me to feel strapped or envious. There is no reason for me to be enslaved to debt. There is no reason for money to control me. There is no reason for me to want more.

I believe that a huge part of being a good steward of wealth is giving much of it away, and I’m very committed to that. That doesn’t mean that we’re not allowed to enjoy abundance. But instead of unconsciously bowing down to consumerism in the form of more stuff, more space, more gadgets, and more clothes, we will decide where our money goes. For us, that place is travel.

A Nested Nomad Has Roots and Wings

I love to read travel blogs and books. I can spend hours upon hours being swept away by fictional stories set in far-off places, real or imagined. If I could pick just one TV channel to watch forever and ever, it would be the Travel Channel. (Fact: As a kid, my favorite show was Great Hotels with Samantha Brown. I wanted to be her. I kind of still do.)

But as I devoured more and more travel blogs and books and shows, I realized that most of the people behind these things were true nomads. Even if they didn’t start out that way, they eventually sold everything, moved overseas, and made their lives out of traveling.

While I would love to do that for a time, but that will likely never be my life. Dan and I both have full-time jobs that we love. We hope to have kids and put down roots. We are very close with our families and would have a hard time leaving them. We love travel and adventure, but we are not cut out to be nomads.

My family moved around a lot during my childhood. I have lived in four states and more than 25 homes, attended nine different schools, and made more friends than I can count. Moving around as much as I did helped this painfully shy, deeply introverted girl to develop wings (and social skills). I have loved and cherished every single place I’ve lived, and even now, I have treasured friends spread out all over the country.

Dan, on the other hand, lived in the same neighborhood his whole life (until he left for college). He is still close with his childhood friends, and they all live within a 25-minute radius. I appreciate his deep roots; I longed for a life like that when I was a child.

Our backgrounds have led me to crave both roots and wings for our family. I want our children to have a place to call home and a stable family where they will always belong. I want them to dig in and build relationships and commit well to people. But I also want them to be boldly independent, confident, curious, adventurous people. I don’t want them to be afraid of challenges and change.

My hope is that our children will become people who love to explore and learn. People who are able to think for themselves and embrace the diversity and beauty and messiness of our world. People who know the value of every dollar and every human and who consistently choose to pursue relationships over “getting ahead.”

So why did I choose The Nested Nomad?

I love the romantic parts of a nomadic lifestyle: wandering, exploring, adventuring.

I love the romantic parts of a nested lifestyle: having a place that is home, filled with memories, so familiar and comfortable.

Neither is perfect. Both are beautiful.

Roots and wings. Nested and nomadic.

Also, both words start with the letter n, so it’s pretty catchy.

Disney

A little taste of my childhood travels. Classic 90s picture of a trip to Disney World.

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Filed Under: Simple Living & Minimalism, Travel Tagged With: adventure, consumerism, freedom, home, living simply, money, paleo, travel

« Introducing The Nested Nomad!
Debunking the Mythical Definition of Travel [Part 1 of 2] »




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brittanylbergman

Brittany L. Bergman
What a beautiful, exhausting, festive, heartbreaki What a beautiful, exhausting, festive, heartbreaking, cozy, chaotic-but-strangely-quiet Christmas we had. ✨🎄✨

That’s a wrap for me on 2020—I’ll be off social media until sometime in January. May you be filled with peace and hope as we close this year but still wait for the close of this chapter in our history. 💜
I have faced Christmases full of grief and loss; d I have faced Christmases full of grief and loss; depression and rage; exhaustion and loneliness. But I can honestly say this is the weariest Christmas I can remember. I say that not to shine a spotlight on me, but to say that I have a feeling this might be your experience too. I’m with you.
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And so the words to my favorite Christmas hymn hit me different this year. They resonate in a place much deeper, more tender and true than ever before. I rejoice in the giggles of my meltdown-prone child. I rejoice in stolen moments alone in the dark, the room lit only by the glow of the Christmas tree. I rejoice in every video and every social media post I see of a frontline worker receiving the COVID vaccine, our ticket out of this nightmare. I rejoice in the vision that next Christmas might look more familiar than this one does. I rejoice in the hope of Christ, whose universal, creative, motherly love holds the whole universe together.
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On this Christmas Eve, I’ll leave you with this quote from Howard Thurman. I hope these words bring a slant of light to your day.
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“The symbol of Christmas—what is it? It is the rainbow arched over the roof of the sky when the clouds are heavy with foreboding. It is the cry of life in the newborn babe when, forced from its mother’s nest, it claims its right to live. It is the brooding Presence of the Eternal Spirit making crooked paths straight, rough places smooth, tired hearts refreshed, dead hopes stir with newness of life. It is the promise of tomorrow at the close of every day, the movement of life in defiance of death, and the assurance that love is sturdier than hate, that right is more confident than wrong, that good is more permanent than evil.”
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Whatever and however you celebrate at this time of year, I’m sending you all my love and peace. 💫
I found my Christmas spirit this weekend, just in I found my Christmas spirit this weekend, just in the nick of time.

I baked cookies with Selah without getting frustrated (first time ever?), took the kids on drive to see Christmas lights, and wrapped a bunch of gifts.

But here’s what I think did the trick, and please do steal this idea (because I stole it from someone else but have no idea who): Magical Movie Night™️.

On Saturday night, I stealthily placed a golden ticket under Selah’s pillow (which I printed from the internets and colored quickly with a yellow marker; good enough is good enough for Magical Movie Night!). We put Eamon to bed and got Selah ready for bed too, going through all the normal motions of brushing teeth, putting on pajamas, picking out a book. When we climbed into bed, I told her to look under her pillow.

She was confused when she found the ticket, and I told her it was for a Christmas movie night. “When?” she asked. “Right now!” I said. “What do you mean ‘right now’?” When it dawned on her that she was going to stay up past her bedtime to have a special movie night with Mommy and Daddy (sans Eamon), she lost her mind with excitement.

Bonus: Gramma was waiting downstairs with a bag of popcorn and Swedish Fish!

We snuggled under blankets, turned on Elf, and laughed our festive butts off. (This was her first time watching Elf, and it felt like the dawning of a new era. It’s such a big kid movie! And she loved it! Hold me. 😭)

Deck the halls, bring on Christmas, fill my mug with holly jolly goodness. 

I also acknowledge this has been a crappy year in so many ways, and I know many of you are not going to be able to access Christmas cheer this year. That’s okay. The real spirit of Christmas is light breaking through the dark, love making a way, and the beauty that can’t help seeping through the dirty, messy, horribly human moments of our lives. So you’re covered.

(And if you want to fake it ’til you make it, give Magical Movie Night a try. It’s the actual easiest.)
In which I couldn’t come up with a clever captio In which I couldn’t come up with a clever caption. There are signs of life but my brain is dead. 💀
“This is what I find most mystifying about Adven “This is what I find most mystifying about Advent: the period of waiting ultimately ends in great joy, but we can’t get to that great joy without intense, active, unbearable pain. In Advent we sense the mingling of anticipation and anxiety, excitement and disappointment, joy and pain, hope and fear.
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“On this side of history, we have the luxury of waiting with great hope, great joy, and great expectation. We know Jesus will be born, we know he will save us and redeem us, we know he will die and rise again, and we know he will set all things right one day.
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“But before Christ came, Advent was dark. It was lonely and unknown, as the Israelites waited in faith to hear from God, and all they got was… nothing. Silence.
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“Isn’t this more characteristic of the waiting we usually do? The waiting seasons of our lives are less often marked by joy and hope and more often marked by pain and fear. They are not often cozy or comforting but difficult and dark and even laborious.
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“We wait as a pregnant mother waits for her child to be born—there’s a vision of the joy to come, to be sure, but in the throes of gut-wrenching labor pains, we think we might actually die before we see that joy fulfilled. After a long season of pregnancy, when the fullness of time has arrived, the advent of labor ushers in the real period of waiting—and it is active and painful and raw.”
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// From “In the Fullness of Time,” a new blog post on @first15. There’s a link in my bio to the whole piece, with thoughts on pregnancy, Advent, and waiting well in an exceptionally hard year. 💜 Thank you so much to @first15 for publishing this post!
We’re in the thick of a collective physical, spi We’re in the thick of a collective physical, spiritual, and emotional season of waiting. A nonexhaustive list: Waiting for a vaccine. Waiting for the pandemic to relent. Waiting for test results. Waiting to hug and kiss and hold the hands of our loved ones. Waiting for children. Waiting with children. Waiting on children. Waiting for rescue. Waiting for rest. Waiting for the birth of Christ. Waiting for the birth of a child. Waiting for a new revelation. Waiting for 2021. Waiting for January 20. Waiting for justice. Waiting for movement. Waiting for stillness. Waiting to be seen. Waiting to fade away. Waiting with hope. Waiting with heartache. Waiting with anticipation.

Whatever you are waiting on today, may this prayer be a companion and encouragement to stay the course. You are not alone. We wait with you. 🌈
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Brittany L Bergman is a for-profit blog. Any company that I collaborate with is chosen by me and fits the theme and readership of my blog. At times, posts may contain affiliate links or sponsored content, which is never at any charge to you.

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