Forward

Wisconsin's state motto is a single word: Forward. Adopted in 1851, it was meant to capture something about the state's character — progressive, purposeful, eyes ahead. I grew up in Wisconsin, but I didn't understand it until I left and gained a different perspective. And now I'm choosing it, deliberately, as the place where True North Community will take root.

That choice deserves some explanation.

For a long time, geography was a variable I kept deliberately open for True North. The thinking was sound: don't narrow the founder pool before you have to. Let the community define itself first, then find the land. What I didn't fully reckon with was that "anywhere" is not a place. You cannot build something real in the abstract. And at some point, holding the location open stops being strategic flexibility and starts being a way of keeping the whole thing safely in the clouds — beautiful, possible, unthreatening.

It's no longer only just up in the clouds. I'm choosing to ground it in a place.

That place is Wisconsin — specifically the corridor between Madison and Milwaukee, two cities that together hold more than enough of what women rebuilding their lives on their own terms are likely to need. And while the practical reasoning matters — the business I'm building needs roots, the land economics work, the geography is genuinely accessible — the practical reasoning isn't really why.

The why is harder to explain and more true.

I lived for a time in Colorado. Beautiful state. Genuinely, jaw-droppingly beautiful. But there's something about that landscape that never let me rest. In Colorado, you don't go for a walk — you go hiking, ideally on your way to summiting one of the fifty-eight fourteeners. You don't go for a bike ride — you go mountain biking, and the implication is always that you should be going harder, faster, higher. The environment itself feels like a permanent test. Altitude sickness is a real possibility. The weather on a summer afternoon can turn hypothermic without much warning. I was never comfortable outside there, not really — not in the way you need to be comfortable to actually be somewhere.

Wisconsin outdoors is different. My dad was a hunter, so I grew up moving through woods with attention and respect, not conquest. We camped. We fished. The land received us. That's the only way I know how to say it — it received us. You could be casual out there. You could be a beginner. The parks and trails and lakeshores were not issuing a challenge; they were extending an invitation.

That distinction turns out to matter, when you're building a community for women who are done proving something.

The Wisconsin I grew up in had a particular texture. Green rolling hills in the south, dotted with red barns and wide patches of hardwoods. Up north, the glaciers left the terrain flatter, more austere — and in October, that austerity turns into Fall colors that will take your breath away with their beauty. Every town has its own festival. Gemütlichkeit Days in Jefferson. The Cranberry Festival in Warrens. Summerfest in Milwaukee, which is its own category of thing entirely. Independence Day parades where you actually recognize the people in the crowd, or in the parade itself.

There are Civil War monuments in the local cemeteries — not grand ones, just the community's accounting of who it sent and who it lost. Watertown built a scaled-down version of the Vietnam Memorial because the town wanted its veterans named in a place people could actually get to. Historical markers appear on rural highways without warning, planted at the exact spot where something worth remembering happened, addressed to whoever happens to have been curious enough to stop and find out.

On his first trip through my home state, my ex made an observation that I've never forgotten: instead of the pattern you see in much of this vast country — long stretches of nothing punctuated by occasional large population centers — Wisconsin runs at a constant frequency. Small towns and villages every few miles, evenly distributed, like a heartbeat. The fabric was woven that way from the beginning, along the weft of immigrant communities — German, Scandinavian, and more recently Mexican and Hmong — and the warp of agricultural communities that raised barns together and helped each other with the harvest. The tavern wasn't just a bar; it fielded a softball team in the summer and served as a third space for the community year-round. The supper club wasn't just a restaurant; it was where you went for the good stuff, unhurried.

And fresh cheese curds. If you know, you know.

Wisconsin has drifted in recent years — politically, culturally — away from the progressive roots that once defined it. That's a real thing, and I won't pretend otherwise. But those roots are still there, under the surface, and the women most likely to find their way to True North are the ones who know how to read a place's bones rather than just its current headlines. Wisconsin has good bones. It has a history of fighting for things that matter — workers' rights, public education, the idea that a community's obligations extend beyond its most comfortable members. I believe it has the capacity to find its way back to that. And I'd rather be part of a community in a place that's capable of returning to itself than in a place that was never complicated to begin with.

True North will be full of women who fight — for voting rights, for women's rights, for social welfare and justice. That's not a political platform; it's just what happens when you gather women who've been paying attention. Wisconsin feels like the right ground for that.

There is something that happens when you stop treating a decision as provisional. The energy that was going into keeping options open becomes available for something else — for actually building the thing.

True North is for women who are done with accidental proximity and ready for something chosen. Sisters-by-choice-not-by-blood. The location is now chosen too. The Madison-to-Milwaukee corridor, in a state that was progressive before progressive needed defending, in a landscape that receives rather than challenges, among communities that have always understood that showing up for each other is not a nice-to-have.

Forward is the right word. It always was.