Our Journey to Masse Mountain: Living a Life That Feels Like Home
That’s ‘moss,’ not ‘massey’ btw. When you’re finished reading, this gallery below is like the photo story of this piece.
In 2016, our family lived in our dream “forever home” in Michigan. On paper, I’d created a life that looked perfect—we were all healthy, financially secure, and surrounded by friends and family. We could check all the boxes that screamed: “Life is GOOD!”
You know what?
Life really was good back then…
(See? Aww the memories!)
…and also not so much.
On the outside, it looked like success, but on the inside, it often felt like living on autopilot or just drifting through.
My life was everything I thought I wanted, yet something inside kept whispering, “But why don’t I feel it?”
It was a question I couldn’t shake, but I did my best to silence it. I’d tell myself, “Settle into gratitude, Marie. You should feel grateful.” And I was, in many ways. But some parts of that gratitude felt hollow, forced—a surface-level appreciation that didn’t touch the emptiness underneath. I’d often return to the thought, ‘It’s not supposed to feel like this.’
Then, my mind would jump in with its usual logic, ‘This is life. This is what it means to be an adult. You need to learn to love it. Grow where you’re planted.’
The Nudge Toward Something Different
In June 2016, that restlessness reached a tipping point. I thought, ‘We need adventure! We need to really live.’
My mind spun with possibilities, and I landed on a big one: buying an Airstream, taking the kids on the road, and unschooling them as we traveled the country. My idea was to retire Dave and become the breadwinner, as this simpler way of living would make that possible. It felt like the ultimate reset button—an escape from routines, a shot of freedom, a way to fill that hollow space I couldn’t ignore.
Almost immediately, I found a 1976 Airstream Ambassador for $2,000. We drove several hours into Canada to buy it (a whole adventure in itself!) and brought it home with plans to rebuild it and hit the road the next spring. But, as things go, life had other plans. We gutted the Airstream down to the frame, even took the frame off the trailer for repairs, and then, while waiting on a long shipping time for specialty vintage replacement parts, winter arrived. The Airstream ended up under tarps, untouched, collecting snow in our driveway.
That winter, I found myself circling the same thought:
→ ‘I can’t wait another winter. This isn’t going to be ready by spring. This isn’t happening on my timeline.’
With the Airstream sitting out in the cold, I began asking myself the deeper questions:
→ What am I really searching for?
→ Is it freedom, adventure… or something else entirely?
As it turned out, the shift I needed wasn’t about hitting the road; it was about going inward, to examine what I wanted my life to feel like, and leaning into that.
Among a few other things, this meant aliveness. I didn’t fully know it at the time—I just knew I needed something different.
Rewriting the “Shoulds”
I sensed that I’d built a life based on what I was “supposed to” want. It was the culmination of what society and outside noise told me I wanted, but not what my soul truly needed.
Yet, that cliche, “You deserve more!” felt icky. I’d seen it in MLMs, life coaching circles, and ads. I had told myself, ‘Actually, always seeking ‘more’ leads to discontentment. Plus, it’s a ploy from consumerism to get us to buy more stuff, because ‘we deserve it’ and ‘you only live once’ so it’s okay to buy the thing, do the thing, keep going for more.’
It contradicted the contentment I was supposed to feel in the life I had, leaving me torn. How could I feel abundance in what I have, and still want more? How could both be true? These competing truths felt confusing.
But the need to go deeper, to be fully alive, was a truth I couldn’t ignore. I was experiencing some aliveness—like in the creativity I poured into my business and the satisfaction of having built the life I’d chosen.
Those sneaky truths:
→ I chose this. I chose where I was. I co-created this life.
Those made identifying what I was looking for so difficult. But here’s the thing: just the act of choosing your life doesn’t mean you’re always living it intentionally. It can accidentally be surface-level intentionality, missing the bits that are innately you.
Back then, I hadn’t even identified aliveness as one of my personal values. My values, as I thought of them, were supposed to look a certain way: family, marriage, health, honesty…. all the things you feel you’re n ungrateful, shallow person if you don’t say them.
I didn’t realize I was allowed to claim things like creativity and autonomy and aliveness as guiding principles, things that actually made me feel connected to the innate parts of myself.
When I took a fresh look at the state of our life, I realized the most urgent need was to break out of the endless cycle of waiting. Waiting for bedtime, for the weekend, for summer, the next family vacation—always something ahead in the future.
The long Michigan winters, two young kids—one with challenges we didn’t have a name for, much less know how to support yet—and Dave’s intense work hours were wearing me down. Dave’s high-stress aerospace job wasn’t just weighing on him, too; it was affecting our family rhythm. By the time he’d get home to a tired, often grumpy wife, he was walking straight into the full job of parenting. We were tag-teaming through life, not doing life together like we had planned.
So, as I unlearned what I thought was intentional living, I examined my beliefs, my values, and evidence from my experiences. I explored my desires with lots of talks with Dave on all of it. Poor guy. I have a rich, imaginative, intellectual, let’s figure out the world kind of brain. He was like, ‘Not again,’ many times.
Goodness I love that man for sticking with me through my “meaning of life” convos.
Noticing the Tiny Stories
Without realizing it, I leaned into the tiny stories my life and of our family life—doing my story work without even knowing it. A few examples:
One morning at the cabin, I was frustrated. I’d wanted an early night, but the rest of the adults stayed up late—keeping me awake—playing cards. My toddler didn’t care, of course. As I’d expected, he was up early, ready to explore. While everyone else slept, I walked behind Levi as he pushed his dump truck along the dirt paths around the cabin, playing with his monster trucks in the earth, and I noticed: ‘We don't do this at home,’ and the simplicity of it surprised me.
A year later, on another walk with Levi, he was picking up the sand and throwing it around, just having an absolute ball. I made a picture. He was immersed into the environment.
One evening, we went fishing with my dad. My daughter Kendall was done with fishing and started dragging her hand through the water as the boat drifted across the lake. I could feel her sensory exploration in that moment because I’d done the same as a child—resting my hand in the lake to feel the coolness, leaving lines across the water. I made a photograph, and even now, when I look at it, I feel the lake I know so well, I smell its scent, and return to that feeling of aliveness up at the cabin.
These were the tiny stories of aliveness I wanted more of—and there are dozens more of them—though I hadn’t yet known how to put it into words. In fact, these stories weren’t about my aliveness, they were about seeing aliveness in my kids.
Still, reflecting on my tiny stories, I noticed a pattern:
Every time I felt alive in my own life, I was surrounded by nature with room to breathe and explore, usually chasing a frog, doodling something in a notebook up in a tree, or something equally spectacular.
The moments when we felt the most alive and connected as a family? Vacations, which were mostly up north, at my dad’s cabin (which I’d visited regularly since I was a baby).
I thought, ‘Cabin life is for escape and play, not for day-to-day living. Or... could it be?’
“Every time I felt alive in my own life, I was surrounded by nature with room to breathe and explore, usually chasing a frog, doodling something in a notebook up in a tree, or something equally spectacular.”
Opening the Door to New Possibilities
With this new insight, I laid out four options for Dave:
Stay in Michigan, change nothing, and wait it out.
Stick with the original Airstream plan and take it on the road.
Sell everything, find a move-in-ready camper, and go ASAP.
Move somewhere up north and live in a forested area that felt like the cabin.
Option four was ruled out quickly. Michigan winters were tough enough already, and moving even further north was out of the question. But as we crossed it off the list, another idea sparked:
→ What if we kept the cabin vibes but moved somewhere warmer?
We didn’t make any decisions that night, but we opened the door to something new. Within days, Dave mentioned, “A guy at work said Greenville, South Carolina, is great.”
I shrugged and replied, “Never heard of it,” but many thanks to my ADHD hyperactive, impulsive mind, I quickly booked a family scouting trip down south.
I used this unearthed self-awareness and the novelty of a new idea to make big, quick moves.
The Journey South
In July 2017, we packed up the kids, a stack of Dave’s resumes (each labeled with my handwritten note: “in town for in-person interviews now through 7/27”), and a list of potential workplaces—whether they were hiring or not. We hit the road for the twelve-hour drive south, with zero expectations and no attachment to any specific outcome. I just needed to be doing something—anything—beyond more waiting for life to change on its own.
Once we arrived, we started dropping off Dave’s resumes around Greenville and the surrounding towns. I was the chief navigator, the kids were entertained in the back seat with their iPad and headphones, and we filled the week with playground picnics and grilled meals each night to keep it cheap. After a week and nearly 2,500 miles, we returned to Michigan. Dave accepted a job offer just days after, and from there, everything moved quickly. Within six weeks, we relocated to a rental home in South Carolina and our Michigan “forever” home was SOLD!
An Unexpected Sign at Exit 5
A few days before we could move into the rental, the kids and I stayed in an Airbnb in Lake Lure, North Carolina, while Dave was finishing the packing back in Michigan.
On our first full day there, I needed to register our daughter at her new school. So, we drove down into South Carolina, took care of registration, and then started back toward the Airbnb.
At one point, we had to make a quick stop, and we happened to exit I-26 at Exit 5, where we were met with the most breathtaking view of the mountains. I had to pull over and snap a picture. A fleeting thought hit me:
→ When we buy a house, I want to see the mountains every day.
And just as fast as the thought hit me, we continued onward back to the AirBNB and that view wasn’t given another thought.
Over the next couple of days, back in Lake Lure, our AirBNB had a quiet, private beach that reminded me of the Michigan lakes I’d grown up with, but with mountains (!) in the backdrop. At night, the katydids’ hum filled the air, so loud you could hear them even with the windows shut. It was as if they were whispering, “There’s more for you here.”
The Move to Masse Mountain
We settled into our South Carolina rental in September 2017, but that wasn’t the end of the story. On our scouting trip, we’d stayed at a magical little mountaintop Airbnb (you can see it here) in Zirconia, North Carolina. I’d thought it would be fun to be in the mountains “just for the trip,” with our real focus on exploring Greenville. But as we spent time in that Airbnb, something shifted in me.
We saw rhododendrons in bloom, visited waterfalls in the mountain rivers, walked on trails through the forest, and listened to the katydids in the evenings—all things new yet familiar and certainly much wilder than anything we’d experienced up north. But, that was for vacation, not real life… or so we thought.
November 2017, a house for sale came on my radar. It seemed almost too good to be true: 10 wooded acres, up on a little mountain, moderately up-to-date, and only 40 minutes from Dave’s work. But there was one hitch: it was way out of our price range. We ignored the house at first, but after seeing close to 20 homes that just didn’t feel right, we said, “Well, why not just look?”
So, on November 5th—my birthday—we did. On the way there, we had to exit the highway at the exact exit (exit 5 from I-26) with the stunning mountain view! As we drove away from the highway, the road we were on was like driving on the roads in “up north” Michigan. It reminded me of the drive to my grandparent’s place in Gladwin, Michigan.
Oh man, I was getting excited but also dreading the disappointment I assumed would follow. Home buying is so emotionally hard, isn’t it?
We pulled up to the narrow driveway, and it went up, up, up for nearly a 1/4 mile, tightly through the forest. Coming from a state of predominantly flat land, it felt like we were taking off in an airplane! Then, as we pulled up to the house, the forest opened up ever so slightly to the simple home with a gorgeous rock wall and staircase behind it. I was in awe immediately.
The house itself was nothing to write home about. It was much smaller than our 3,200-square-foot home in Michigan. This was under 2,000. But I wasn’t looking for another “dream home.” I wasn’t even looking for “dream space,” but here we were.
Building My Life Brand—and Yours
It was everything we’d hoped for, and then some. It was the peace and privacy of the mountains we’d loved in Zirconia, with enough room to roam and explore right at home. It didn’t need a whole bunch of work and updates. It was definitely out of our price range, but after writing a letter to the seller, when all was said and done, we managed to buy it for $35,000 less than the asking price. (Long story for another day!) It was still a leap for us, but we went for it.
Today, we live on what we lovingly call “Masse Mountain.” It’s our oasis. Every day here feels a bit like vacation—a life where we’re deeply connected to nature, to each other, and to the sense of wonder and adventure we felt back in Zirconia. Funny enough, that AirBNB in Zirconia is less than 20 minutes away from where we live. That place changed our lives.
As we settled into Masse Mountain, I realized something profound: this wasn’t just about creating a new life in a beautiful place. It was about building a life brand, a personal philosophy that guides how I think, feel, and show up every day.
I wake up every day and practically have to pinch myself: I really live here?! It’s not just the location (you don’t have to move like I did!). It’s the lifestyle.
“Masse Mountain” is what I call my own Life Brand. Every decision I make is now filtered through this “Masse Mountain” lens—and seven years after the move, I can confidently say it’s still working.
“Just like a business brand, a life brand is built on core beliefs, values, and purpose.”
Just like a business brand, a life brand is built on core beliefs, values, and purpose. It’s a guiding set of principles; your compass for living intentionally. My “Masse Mountain” filter has guided everything—our lifestyle, our vehicles (I had to have a Jeep to explore these mountains!), our kids’ education, our marriage, my work, the clothes I wear, and more. It’s influenced how I show up for myself and how I continue to grow, learn, create, and experience life.
It’s a whole vibe. My vibe.
Just as Masse Mountain became my anchor, the Life Brand Method is a way to honor and elevate the parts of life that feel real and deeply meaningful. I developed it as a framework to help others live with clarity, direction, and purpose—to stop drifting through life on autopilot and instead create a life that celebrates their values. Living with intention takes more than setting goals; it’s about knowing what matters and filtering every choice through what truly aligns with who you are.
“Intentional, meaningful living doesn’t just happen—it has to be created, piece by piece, story by story. ”
The Life Brand Method was born to help anchor those values that had finally come into focus for me: aliveness, autonomy, creativity, joy, and meaningful connection. It’s my personal framework for reconnecting with what’s real and meaningful and letting that guide every choice I make. This method became my compass for tuning out the noise and choosing only what was aligned with who I am. And now, it’s a guide for others to do the same—to craft a life that genuinely honors their own deeply held values.
An Invitation to Find Your Own Version of Masse Mountain
If there’s a whisper inside you, nudging, telling you there’s something different—something more truly, deeply you—trust it. Your version of Masse Mountain is out there, waiting to be claimed.
Maybe it starts by looking inward, by listening to the stories that have led you here. The Life Brand Method is a gentle invitation to start that journey, to listen and create, to make a life that feels like coming home to yourself. Not someday. But today.
