ABOUT ROOT & WANDER
Root & Wander was born from a quiet tension I’ve come to recognize as essential to how I move through the world.
I am someone who loves to stay. To make a home slowly. To notice the light as it shifts across the same wall each afternoon. To read, to write, to make art in the familiar rhythm of a place that begins to know me as I know it. There is a deep satisfaction in tending, to space, to practice, to the small rituals that give shape to a life.
Staying, for me, is not static. It is a way of seeing. Of returning to the same paths, the same landscapes, and finding something newly revealed each time. Awe, I’ve come to realize, isn’t only found in distant places, it lives just as fully in my own backyard. In the changing seasons, in overlooked details, in the quiet act of paying attention. The familiar becomes expansive when we learn how to look.
I am also a mother. For years, my sense of place has been intertwined with raising children, building a home not just as a physical space, but as a living, evolving center of care, creativity, and return. That grounding has shaped everything.
And now, as my youngest begins to prepare to leave the nest, I find myself standing at a threshold. The home remains, but its rhythm is changing. A new kind of spaciousness is opening, one that holds both tenderness and possibility.
Alongside this rootedness, I have always felt a call outward. Toward the unfamiliar, the distant, the not-yet-known. I travel to experience the texture of different cultures, to move through landscapes that reshape my sense of scale, to learn through encounter. I bike long stretches of road, follow stories into new geographies, and make films as a way of listening more closely. In these moments, there is awe, disorientation, expansion, an opening that reminds me how much of the world exists beyond what I can hold.
Root & Wander lives in the space between these impulses.
It is a journal for those who feel both the desire to root deeply and the pull to wander. For those who understand that staying and traveling are not opposites, but part of the same ongoing relationship to place, to self, and to the wider world. That what we carry away from a place shapes how we return, and what we learn in motion deepens how we inhabit stillness.
I started this publication at this particular moment in my life, as both a continuation and a beginning. A way to honor the years of making a home, and to step into what comes next. A space to explore this transition in real time: the opening outward, the returning inward, the redefinition of what home can be.
Root & Wander is also an invitation.
Over time, I hope it becomes a gathering place for other voices, writers, artists, filmmakers, explorers and observers of the world, who are asking similar questions. How do we belong to where we are? How do we move through the world with care and curiosity? What does it mean to return, changed?
As this journal grows, so too will the community around it, an ever-expanding constellation of perspectives, grounded in attention and shaped by experience.
This is a space for both staying and going. For tending what is close and discovering what is far. For making meaning in the midst of change, wherever we find ourselves.
— Sarah Bachinger
