It's Your Life.
How Do You Want To Live It?
On my porch. Pull up a chair.
Maybe your story is echoed in mine.
There's a moment — maybe you've had it —
where you look at the life around you
and realize you don't quite recognize it.
Or worse: you recognize it perfectly,
and none of it is yours.
Maybe it happened suddenly.
A betrayal, a diagnosis, a loss, a dissolution
that arrived without warning and
radically rearranged everything.
Maybe it happened slowly,
the way a coat becomes uncomfortable
before you finally admit it never fit.
Either way, you're here now.
And, like me, you've become
an Architect of the Unknown.
An Everyday Alchemist
who transmutes the everyday
into something else entirely.
Standing at the edge of something unfamiliar,
looking out at a horizon with no map,
no guarantee, just a terrifying suspicion that
all of this upheaval, loss, and disorientation
might somehow be necessary
for your next step.
It is.
Not because suffering is noble
or loss is a gift wrapped in a lesson.
But because sometimes the only way
back to yourself is through the wreckage
of everything that wasn't you.
I know this place.
I've been tracking it in real time
and writing essays that take
the small and ordinary events of life
and crack them open to find what's inside.
A portable generator delivered by mistake... or was it?
An ad for pair of boots on a dating site that was more
compelling than the profiles of men holding fish.
The particular silence of menopause
that nobody warns you about.
The moment you stop outsourcing
your own knowing and finally trust yourself
as the authority on your own life.
No formula. No fix. No finish line.
Just an invitation to notice your own life
with all the vulnerability, discomfort,
and uncertainty you can stand.
Because attention is a compass.
And when you finally stop tracking what you've lost,
you start noticing what's still with you
and what's wilder, stranger,
more honestly yours.
Please know this:
You are not alone on this quest.
I'm here to walk alongside you in this oddly specific,
devastatingly disorienting, occasionally absurd,
and surprisingly funny experience of losing everything
familiar and getting to discover who you actually are.
Together we'll read and write
our way out and through.
Read It and Leap is an ongoing collection of essays
from inside the upheaval,
written for anyone standing on the brink
of their own leap into the unknown.
Come find yourself in the stories.
About Penny
Every porch needs someone who keeps the light on for you. Meet the woman - and the dogs - waiting to welcome you.
"I follow curiosity. It rarely leads me wrong."
Penny Plautz has spent most of her life being curious,
asking questions, and finding the meaning
— and the humor — in things.
She has worked with shamans in Mexico and healers in Bali. She has written books, built practices, and guided people through thresholds they weren't sure they could cross.
She still does. Just more intentionally now.
With better questions and fewer answers.
When her own life fell apart — spectacularly, instructively, publicly — she stepped fully into the real work
of becoming who she always was.
She did what any reasonable person does
in the aftermath of a lifequake
that rearranges everything.
She moved to her family farm with two dogs
who secretly knew they were also therapists.
Ruby — her fire, her ride or die,
her partner in all adventures.
Pearl — her joy, her love bug,
her gentle daily reminder to play.
She started writing essays about losing everything familiar
and finding something truer on the other side.
She is a writer, a podcaster, a guide, a facilitator.
A certified eating psychology coach and creativity coach
with three decades of experience helping people
find their way back to themselves.
She is no longer the fitness instructor she once was,
or the consultant who optimized and achieved
and helped others do the same.
She has traded hustle for wholeness,
achievement for aliveness,
metrics for meaning,
and the relentless pursuit of better for
something subtler and more honest.
As she stopped trying to be more,
she discovered the unexpected thrill of being less.
And she continues to follow her curiosity
because it rarely leads her wrong.
Creating conscious communities
has become the calling.
It turns out it has always
been the work.
Not projecting wisdom
or arriving anywhere in particular.
Just paying attention, telling the truth,
listening to others express theirs,
and trusting that a life fully inhabited
— even a messy, rearranged, starting-over life —
is more than enough to work with.
She is still here.
Still evolving.
Still learning to be
unapologetically herself.
Maybe you are, too?
If so, come be part of this.