Living Outside the Box with Sydney Michalski

From suburbia to homesteading

Welcome to the first in a new series - Living Outside the Box! In these interviews, I want to share the stories of people who are stepping outside the confines of societal expectations and finding new paths and experiences.

I hope that these posts help us all to question some of the assumptions we’ve been conditioned to make about how life “should” be or “has” to be, and to open our minds to other possibilities. Maybe it will even inspire and empower others to follow their own yearning for another way.

If you live (or have lived) a life that is unconventional or unexpected in some way and you’d like to share it in a future Living Outside the Box post, you can answer the interview questions here.

In this month’s interview, I would like to introduce you to

Sydney Michalski

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Meet Sydney

From L to R: Sydney with her husband, Joe; the family’s cabin; Sydney, Joe and their three children at the nearby shore. Photos by Sydney Michalski.

Sydney Michalski is an author and photographer, living on a small family homestead in Downeast Maine with her husband and three children. In 2013, the family left suburban Kansas in search of a simpler life, closer to nature, and they’ve never looked back.

Sydney’s husband, Joe, is a woodworker and soap-maker, and their new way of living has led them both to learn a wide variety of hand-crafts. You can shop with them online at rivenjoiner.com. You can also browse Sydney’s online print gallery at sydney-michalski.pixels.com, or find her books at amazon.com/author/smichalski.

Tell us about your “outside the box” life.

Our family started out living a suburban life in Overland Park, Kansas. I worked as a manager in a manufacturing company, while my husband stayed home with the kids and renovated our house. We did all the normal city-life things, although we were also always the “outdoorsy” family. As we talked about our values and how we wanted our kids to grow up, we became more and more drawn to a simpler life, being closer to nature, and doing more things by hand.

In 2013, when our kids were 6, 5, and 2, we sold our house, packed everything we owned into a 5x8 trailer, and set out to find a place to put down roots. There were a few different stops over the course of a three year journey, but eventually we ended up in Downeast Maine, where we found a little abandoned cabin on eight acres of woods to become our homestead. We have done most of the work on our property by hand, clearing about one acre of overgrown homesite into orchards and farm beds.

From our few acres of forest, we harvest firewood from downed trees which provides all of our winter heat. My husband, a woodworker, makes many of the things we need around the house, often from wood harvested from our property. We incorporate a lot of wild and native resources into our farm and orchards, like wild apples, elderberries, blueberries, violets, and roses. This is a benefit of clearing by hand - you can work around all the special things that you want to preserve. We forage chanterelles and harvest maple syrup. We make our own soap. We evaporate salt from sea water collected a short drive away. And sometimes, we just do fun old-fashioned projects, like making syrup from violet blossoms to turn lemonade pink, or gathering goldenrod blossoms to dye fabric for curtains.

We homeschool our kids, and we work together as a family on the various projects of maintaining, repairing, and building out our homestead. As a result, the kids have experienced a wide range of activities from clearing to farming to woodworking to building. We make all of our plans with the goal of creating a generational homestead, where our kids can have plenty of space and support to build cabins and raise families of their own, if that’s what they choose.

Photo by Miro Vrlik on Unsplash

What prompted you to make that change?

The thing about the typical suburban life is that, even with a good job, there’s this sense that you are always running at full-speed to keep up with a way of life that keeps outpacing you. Even just to maintain the same lifestyle, living expenses are constantly growing, and we could easily see how much that would accelerate as our three kids continued to grow and explore their own interests and paths through life.

We began looking for ways to simplify and reduce, ways to perhaps unplug a bit, ways to live life with a little gentler footprint. We started right there in suburban Kansas, with very little things. We grew some veggies, baked our own bread, replaced take-out with scratch meals. We appreciated nature and made a habit of learning about it. Not just, “What’s that? A flower.” But, “What’s that? Let’s look it up!” We gathered together some field guides to learn the names of the birds and bugs and flowers in our own back yard, and carried them with us into the little city parks and trails that we would search out for family outings. We experimented with making more things by hand. When baby-number-three came along, I bought fabric and stitched blankets and bibs and burp-cloths. When we had to replace our fence, we looked at the old boards with new eyes and turned them into a patio dining table. It felt broadly right to look for ways to consume a bit less, to appreciate nature, and to do some things by hand. It felt like the kind of thing that anyone and everyone could benefit from, taking steps in that direction in any small ways that were available.

As the small steps added up, we began to consider larger steps. Within a few years, we realized we wanted to look for a place with some land where we could live some degree of a homestead life.

How did people around you react?

One thing that surprised me was the way that people could only relate to our lifestyle changes and our plans from the perspective of “doing what you love” and “following your heart.” The truth for us was that there were a number of things about our choices that were very practical, very logical, and that seemed to us to just make universal sense. But what made sense to us was diverging from the norm, so that it seemed like most people could only process it in terms of an unusual passion or calling. And I think, as well, that our excitement about living a simpler life and being closer to nature and doing things by hand could feel judgmental to people who were living more traditional suburban lives without any plans or interest to do otherwise.

So I found most people to be kind of politely supportive at a safe distance, and those closest to us to be kind of puzzled-happy for us to be doing what we loved.

Exploring life “outside the box” isn’t about trading one set of norms and requirements for another, locking yourself into some new paradigm. The idea is not just to become narrow-minded in a new way. It’s about realizing that life is not a one-size-fits-all solution.

What lessons have you learned from this new lifestyle? 

When you grow your own food, on whatever scale, there is an inherent benefit to how you think about food. You value it more personally, and you begin to choose it more intentionally, and to enjoy it more mindfully. When you spend time learning more about the natural world around you, there is an inherent benefit to how you think about daily living. You value nature more personally when you take the time time to get to know it, and so you want to be more respectful of that connection. When you learn to make something by hand that you used to purchase, there is an inherent benefit to how you think about consumption. You value the resources and the labor more personally, and you want to make the best use of them. And when you choose to do something because you personally believe it’s right and best, there is an inherent benefit to how you think about possibilities and limitations. I’ve often heard people define things as impossible without ever considering whether they are right. When you start by defining what is right, it immediately adjusts what you will accept as impossible.

Wild blueberries on the Michalski family’s farm. Photo credit: Sydney Michalski.

What preconceptions do you think people have about your way of living?

Many people seem to think of a lifestyle like ours as a passion project and an all-or-nothing approach. But the truth is, there are bits and pieces of this life that can be beneficial to anyone, anywhere. Any small ways in which we reduce our consumption, connect with our natural surroundings, and make everyday things by hand are really rewarding. You don’t have to move onto a homestead to grow some tomatoes, and you don’t have to be off-grid to decide you can stitch up some cloth napkins instead of ripping through rolls of paper towels. Our small efforts in these directions also tend to gain momentum and build on themselves over time - so that, after a few successful efforts into reducing needs and making things yourself, you may find that moving onto a homestead in Maine isn’t so very far-fetched, after all!

But also, life changes! Life on the homestead today looks very different from when we began. When we first moved into our cabin and our kids were still little, I did all of our family’s laundry by hand. As the kids and their clothes grew larger, I was really happy when we could put in some plumbing lines that allowed for a washer and dryer!

Exploring life “outside the box” isn’t about trading one set of norms and requirements for another, locking yourself into some new paradigm of being minimalist or closed-loop or off-grid. The idea is not just to become narrow-minded in a new way. It’s about realizing that life is not a one-size-fits-all solution, and that it’s to our benefit to look beyond the models that an industrialized, hyper-consumeristic, wealth-concentrating system presents to us as “the best life”.

I had a neighbor in Kansas who once said, “I’m so tired of people saying they want more natural products with less chemicals! Give me all the chemicals!” Of course, I was definitely someone who looked for more natural products with less chemicals. But I’ve also come to realize that the correct response is not, “No! Absolutely no chemicals! All natural, all the time!” The correct answer is a balance and a journey, it’s navigating life making informed and thoughtful choices along the way. To simply accept a standard sales pitch that newer is always better is naive. To completely reject any developments beyond nature is also naive. The true benefit of living outside of the box is the improved perspective that allows you to choose from a variety of boxes to assemble a healthy fit for yourself and your loved ones at each stage along your journey. 😊

Sydney’s middle son feeding one of the local chipmunks, right out the cabin window! Photo credit: Sydney Michalski.

What advice would you give to anyone else considering life outside the box?

Really know your reasons. Clearly define them and clearly define why they’re important to you, because that’s what you will cling to when times get hard. Times get hard in every single lifestyle, but when times get hard in an unconventional lifestyle, the temptation is much greater to wonder if you’ve made the wrong choice simply because it’s an unusual choice. But if you know that you chose this lifestyle because you deeply believe that it is what is good and right for you, then you can navigate those challenges more calmly.

We ultimately chose our homestead in Maine because we believe it is good and right to reduce our consumption, to live close to nature, and to work with our hands - and this was the place available to us in our journey where we could do that. We believe that it is a place that we can pass down to our children that will have value to them both as a property and, more importantly, as a place where they can live lives that are good and right for them, as well. Those are really strong and lasting reasons to hold onto when, occasionally, things get difficult or uncertain.

And when you run into something that makes you have to change your plan, don’t think of it as something that you did wrong. Sure, life would be easier if we could fast-forward to the end and work our plans back from there. In reality, though, when you set out to do something out-of-the-ordinary, there are going to be a number of things that you only learn by trying, and only figure out when you’re right in the messy middle. That’s not doing something wrong. Re-thinking, adapting, and adjusting to this new information and experience is proof you’re doing something right!

There were several people who said to us, “I wish I had your faith.” I always wished I could convince them, “You do!” Start small. Take one step. And then another. That’s the kind of faith that we had, and that’s all the kind of faith it really takes to pursue a life that’s outside the box. 😊

I’m so grateful to Sydney for sharing her story and her inspiring words. Do check out her Substack, Moments, where she shares photography and stories to bring you closer to nature.

Don’t forget if you’d like to share a story of life outside the box, you can complete the interview questions here.