I like to play a little game. Every few months or so, I stop and think back where I was at that same time the year prior, and contrast it with where I am now. If you do this often enough, take time to pause and reflect on what you’ve built and how far you’ve come, you’ll likely surprise yourself. We’re so busy doing, trying to get where we want to be and get what we want to get, that we neglect to appreciate when we arrive and when we receive. This simple exercise helps me to remedy that. It makes me grateful, and to be honest, it makes me feel proud not only of myself, but of my life.
Pretty sure we could all use more of that.
A few years ago, around this time, as I began to realize that I no longer shared the same values with many of the people I’d been following and reading online, I found one of Shaye Elliott’s videos on YouTube. I’m not sure the people I’d been following had changed, but I guess I was changing, and the world certainly was; I felt a void, like I no longer resonated with content I once took inspiration from, and I didn’t belong anywhere. In the video I began watching, Shaye is talking about using your hands to create things and the beauty of living a simple, creative life. She’s in her home, cooking food in the fireplace. She’s in her kitchen, making what looks like a really good cup of coffee as her children flutter like hummingbirds in the background. The footage is beautifully shot, artful and evocative, and not only the message, but the aesthetic, deeply resonated with me. I thought, Who is this woman?
Just a year or so before that, I’d returned from a trip to Italy with my husband. One of our stops was to the island he’d heard about all his life, the small island of Alicudi where his ancestors came from. I was unfamiliar with the Aeolian Islands and began researching where else we should go and where to stay. I stumbled upon a hotel whose rooms looked so aesthetically up my alley I became entranced. I booked the rooms, trusting my husband would love the place as much as I already did.
When we arrived on the island of Salina, and checked into Hotel Signum, we were not disappointed; it was, by far, the most perfect and beautiful place we stayed the entire trip. The grounds wowed us. The rooms were beautiful at every turn. The food was incredibly delicious. The service impeccable, and, as if all that were not enough, the view from the outdoor dining area was stunning, and there was a spa I wasn’t even aware of open to hotel guests that felt culled from my dreams, designed with such taste and a nod to the natural world it took my breath away. The hotel had a Michelin Star restaurant, which, yet again, I somehow was not aware of until we arrived. It was like the place kept unpacking its treats, one candy wrapper at a time.
We left Signum and Salina bewitched. We didn’t know if we’d ever return, but of course we hoped life would someday bring us back there.
What I most certainly could not have imagined when I found Shaye Elliott on YouTube and Hotel Signum on Salina was that just a few years down the road, I would count Shaye as a friend and spend time with her on the island, at Hotel Signum, cooking with the hotel’s famed Michelin-Star chef, Chef Martina Caruso, and filming it all for Shaye’s YouTube channel. But that’s exactly what happened.