Why “Restoring Hygge”?

This was supposed to be a different podcast.

For months, I planned and researched a podcast I wanted to launch. I purchased music and technology, told all my friends and neighbors to watch for it. I even had multiple drafts of design work done. That podcast was about hygge, too, but specifically hygge and parenting. How do we raise kids with a hygge mindset? I was almost giddy with excitement and wanted to start immediately, but a small intuitive voice I have learned to trust said…just wait. Slow down. It’s not time yet.

I hate that voice. She’s always right.

Sure enough, in June of 2025, just months after deciding to wait until the next Fall for my launch, my home was hit by a derecho. I had never heard of a derecho before one descended upon my house, but they are essentially severe straight-line windstorms. Like a tornado, but with a wider path of destruction instead of a narrow funnel. The one that hit my home was the equivalent of a Category 3 hurricane. Winds between 106-120 mph.

I live in a small, modest house in a cozy nook of forest. It’s an area of Minnesota known as The Northwoods. That night, Old Growth trees (so big my husband and I together couldn’t have gotten our arms around them) rained down on our yard like raindrops, landing around our house with greater boom than the accompanying thunder.

After the storm, we emerged from our basement unable to get out of our house until my husband, after climbing down a tree whose thick branches now hung where our back deck had previously been, located his chainsaw and freed us a path.

Our yard, once shaded and lush, was now as hot and barren as the Arizona desert. A large grove of trees that used to greet visitors like tall soldiers and offer privacy from neighbors and traffic was mostly torn up. What was left teetered so dangerously it had to be clear cut like a field.

Our family was in a daze. As I described it to someone: “I’m in mourning. I feel like I lost my hygge.”

The landscape of my home was the reason we bought the place. It was what calmed me when I was stressed. It was the natural hygge I could rely on during seasons when I otherwise wasn’t practicing it.

How could I make a podcast about hygge when the very setting of my life no longer felt cozy?

And then I realized that perhaps this was the better focus for my podcast. There are so many reasons each of us lose the hygge moments that are vital to our mental health. Kids, yes. Natural disaster, yes. But other situations, too.

As I continue to cleanup our property–rebuild the buildings crushed, replant the trees ripped from the ground–I want to talk to other people about how they are restoring their hygge.