People ask what it's like to live in a yurt and I can tell they're imagining something cinematic. Firelight and silence and morning mist through ancient pines.
Sometimes it's exactly that. Sometimes the pipes freeze.
We've been in the yurt for a few years now, on our land in the Lake Champlain Islands. It's a real home — wood stove, kitchen, a loft. String lights over the cedar arch by the door. A dog who considers herself the official greeter.
What's actually different about yurt life: the sounds. In a house you're insulated from the world. In a yurt you're inside it. Rain sounds like rain. Wind sounds like wind. I know exactly what the weather is doing before I open the door because I've heard it build for an hour. It changes your relationship to the outside — makes you less separate from it.
The hard parts are real too. Small space requires knowing yourself and your partner well. There is no room for avoidance — emotionally or physically. Everything you own has to earn its place. You learn to need less, which turns out to feel like having more.
I think a lot about what this kind of living teaches. The yurt is circular — no corners, no hierarchy of rooms, no place that's more important than another. You sit differently in a round room. Something settles.
I didn't move out here to perform a lifestyle. I moved out here because something in me needed the trees and the quiet and the seasons in order to become what I actually am. That's still happening. I don't think it stops.