Mainer Montanan isn’t a person.
It’s an ethos — a way of being, a way of riding the world, a way of turning sparks, ideas, imagination and visions into something real. The name I adopted “The Mainer Montanan” as a kind of now de guerre when I finally understood what my life had been trying to teach me:
East meets West
Safety meets Risk
We are all creative.
We are all wired for more.
And most of us were simply never shown the map.
For me, it started early. As a kid in elementary school, my eyes used to glaze over and I’d drift into full-blown imagination. Teachers saw daydreaming.
One girl teased me for it.
But what was really happening was this:
My spirit was already leaving the room.
Riding an inner wave.
Catching visions before I even knew that’s what they were.
I learned to hide it over the years — but that inner wanderer, that inner builder, never left.
A Life Split Between Worlds
I was born in Los Angeles in 1969, at White Memorial Hospital — a Seventh-day Adventist medical school hospital. My dad was becoming a physician. My mom was from California. My dad was from Colorado. A West-coast, mountain-blood family wrapped in conservative religious tradition.
Then at four years old, we packed up in a wood-paneled green station wagon and drove nearly 3,000 miles to Maine.
West → East.
Open Big Sky → Tight-Knit Community.
Big Mountains → Deep Woods.
A quiet, slow-burn identity crisis was already underway.
I grew up in a close Seventh-day Adventist community, attending Pine Tree Academy in Freeport, Maine. That’s where I met the Wild Woman — the love of my life — long before either of us knew we’d spend our later years chasing wildness across two states.
She always had a restless spark too. A spark that never quite fit in the tidy New England frame.
Last winter in Yellowstone, a wolf expert asked her point-blank:
“What attracted you to him?”
She didn’t know then, but we’ve talked about it since.
She saw something wild.
She saw something free.
She saw someone who dreamed beyond fences.
She saw the Mainer Montanan before I did.
Risk Off, Risk On & A Two-Decade Dance
We married in 1992. Lived in Portland, Maine during the wild early-’90s. Saved barely enough to make the first big move.
Then, in true “Ride or die” fashion, we packed up our Siberian Husky puppy in a leveraged-to-the-eyeballs Isuzu Rodeo and drove across America chasing Big Mountain skiing — that beautiful, reckless, adrenaline-laced spiritual practice captured in the Greg Stump films.
Taos. Telluride. Then finally Jackson Hole.
Cowboy culture meets extreme skiing. Ride or Die in its purest form.
It carved us.
When we returned East, we did the “normal life” thing — jobs, bills, grind — but the tracks had already laid down.
Hard Wired In & Risk – In My DNA.
I became a financial advisor in 1997. I nearly washed out by 2002 but somehow survived.
The outer world always saw me as competent, disciplined and structured.
Inside, I was still chasing that mountain wave.
A few of us broke off and built Harborview in 2002. It was a Ride or die leap. We almost didn’t make it. The Great Recession nearly buried us. But somehow, through grit and alignment, we survived.
Over time, we built a firm with two offices, six advisors, and a long roster of loyal clients — many of them Outlaws in their own right.
Financially secure.
Living in Maine.
Happy Married.
The Dark Period
I won’t dwell here because this story isn’t about tragedy — it’s about transformation.
But in June of 2023, something in me broke.
Call it depression.
Call it burnout.
Call it a loss of spirit.
Call it losing the spark
A spark that had carried me through every risk, every reinvention, every ride or die moment.
It doesn’t matter what label you use.
What matters is that I wasn’t truly living. My inner fire had gone out.
That moment — that deep, private, near-fatal collapse — became the dragon’s lair I had to walk into.
It was hell. No metaphor necessary.
But it also gave me the diamond.
The framework.
The ethos.
It made me understand that the spark can go out — even in highly creative, visionary people — if it isn’t protected, channeled, and grounded.
Montana and WEST AGAIN: The Phoenix Rises
Now?
Living in two states.
Chasing adventure again.
Finally — finally — building the life we imagined long before we had the means.
There’s a line from Stairway to Heaven that has always followed me:
“There’s a feeling I get when I look to the West, and my spirit is crying for leaving.”
Montana did that to me.
It pulled me back to myself after a long, dark season — a period where the spark dimmed, the color drained out, and I wasn’t really living. When I landed in Bozeman, something shifted. The mountains didn’t just impress me; they woke me up.
Montana demands authenticity.
Maine gives me grounding.
Between them, I rebuilt a life worth living.
Out here, people don’t ask “How are you?” They ask: “What fun thing are you doing today?”
It’s a gentle push toward joy, purpose, and adventure — the everyday kind that slowly restores a soul.
The East steadies me.
The West ignites me.
And somewhere between them:
The Easy does it and The Ride or die.
…the phoenix rose again.
The Pigeons and the Eagles
Every creative person deals with pigeons.
Not people — behaviors.
Pigeon behavior is what keeps people grounded:
– jealousy
– pecking
– smallness
– defensiveness
– cynicism
– fear
– conformity
Eagle behavior is what lets people soar:
– courage
– curiosity
– imagination
– generosity
– risk with wisdom
– alignment
– vision
Here’s the truth:
There are no pigeon spirits. Only pigeon behaviors.
At the spirit level, we are all eagles.
Some people got hurt early.
Some people lost their imagination.
Some people buried their spark to survive.
They stayed on the ground because no one taught them how to fly — or worse, because someone clipped their wings.
My work — and the entire Mainer Montanan ethos — is about lifting people back into the sky.
Even the pecking pigeons.
Even the ones who think they’re grounded for life.
Even the ones who have never felt creative at all.
If you think you’re a pigeon?
You’re not.
If you’re acting like a pigeon?
Stop pecking.
Start soaring.
Your wings still work.
They always have.
The Creative Entrepreneurialism Framework
After the dark period, after rebuilding my life, after rediscovering Montana’s fire, I finally saw the pattern that had been shaping my life all along.
⚡️ Creativity → 🔥 Entrepreneurialism → 📓 Creative Process → 🚀 Entrepreneurship
What I now call:
The Creative Funnel
It is the backbone of the Mainer Montanan way.
A life OS. A reboot and reinstall. A brand new start.
It’s a framework for:
– Thinking like a highly creative person
– Taking big creative risks without taking big financial risks
– Building human capital before financial capital
– Moving fast and staying aligned
– Designing a life that is both wild and stable
– Building without burning down your life
– Creating without destroying yourself
It is risk-off and risk-on, Easy Does It and Ride or Die, Maine and Montana, Kerry and Daryl, Wild Woman and Mainer Montanan, rails-on-edge, control with speed — all fused into one.
What This Ethos Actually Means
It means:
You can build something extraordinary without blowing up your life.
You can chase your spark without losing your footing.
You can be wildly imaginative without being financially reckless.
You can rise from the mud with nothing but grit and vision.
You can create a life that looks impossible from the outside.
And you can do it even if:
– you grew up without money
– you don’t have a degree
– you’ve been told to “be realistic”
– you’ve been pecked by pigeons
– you lost your spark
– you once fell into darkness
– you are rebuilding from ashes
If you’ve read this far, you are already part of this ethos.
Welcome to the movement. Welcome to the Mainer Montanan Way.
This is the work of a lifetime — not a brand, not a gimmick, not a persona.
An ethos forged in risk, rebuilt through discipline, and now offered freely to anyone who needs it.
Let’s ride.
The Mainer Montanan
