"A vida é assim: esquenta e esfria, aperta e daí afrouxa, sossega e depois desinquieta.
O que ela quer da gente é coragem."
— João Guimarães Rosa
Life is like this: it warms and cools, it tightens and then loosens, it settles and then unsettles.
What it asks of us is courage.
I never learned to be just one thing.
For years I treated that as a problem to solve. The strategist hid the poet. The founder resented the mother. The globetrotting entrepreneur judged the homemaker. The world demanded a single definition, one that didn't contradict itself, so I lived explaining and translating myself, trying to make sense to others.
Nest & North is how I stopped.
I finally understood the assignment. The point was never to choose, but to build a category-defining self, to hold my breath through my contradictions long enough that the separate pieces, drifting in from different ends, locked into one cohesive, unprecedented whole.
To build a life spacious enough to hold my multitudes.
Now I do the same for others.
You weren't born to live by someone else's standards, but to become the main character of your own story. To create a life of your own making. To trailblaze new ways of being that wouldn't exist without you.
Writing yourself into clarity is where it begins. Start now.
Founder Story (Three Acts)
ACT IThe Nomadic Entrepreneur Who Built a Home
Born in Brazil, I've lived and worked across San Francisco, Kuala Lumpur, Bali, Lisbon, Buenos Aires, Santiago de Chile, São Paulo, Mauritius, and now the New York City metro, picking up Portuguese, Spanish, English, French, and Indonesian along the way.
I founded a marketplace and sold it. I led growth across continents. I wrote a book, Hacking Communities, in two languages, endorsed by people whose work I admire. For more than fifteen years I've designed community-led systems for growth: building from zero to one, codifying instinct into operational frameworks and leadership systems designed to make me obsolete. I learned how to build. I also learned how to leave when the time was right.
ACT IIThe Artist Who Never Left
And then there is the part of me who came first and never left, the one who stood behind the scenes while the builder and the strategist travelled the world. She took the stage when I became a mother, twice, and there I found my deepest reinvention.
This part of me writes prose and poetry, shapes metal into jewellery and wheat into bread. A metalsmith, a wordsmith, a homemaker in the oldest and most literal sense: one who makes a home.
It turns out that's the same verb I reach for to describe what community builders do.
We build a home where others feel safe to walk in, take off their shoes, and belong.
ACT IIIAct III — The Hostess Who Keeps the Fire
The hostess sets the table where guests land, drop their shoulders, and lose themselves in conversation with strangers who soon become friends. Everything I build is a version of that table. The journey. The circles. I make the excuse for you to gather and hold the space: a nest where you can recalibrate before taking flight again. A mentor, guide, hostess. I walk with you. I help you find north. And if you need refuge, I keep the fire lit. Nest & North is my framework for a whole life.
Two intertwined triangles, one that sustains us, one that expresses us, with belonging at the center. I built it to keep myself whole through the hardest season of reinvention I've known. Now it's the architecture beneath how I live, and beneath everything we make here.
Founder StoryAct I — The Nomadic Entrepreneur Who Built a Home
Born in Brazil, I've lived and worked across San Francisco, Kuala Lumpur, Bali, Lisbon, Buenos Aires, Santiago de Chile, São Paulo, Mauritius, and now the New York City metro, picking up Portuguese, Spanish, English, French, and Indonesian along the way.
I founded a marketplace and sold it. I led growth across continents. I wrote a book, Hacking Communities, in two languages, endorsed by people whose work I admire. For more than fifteen years I've designed community-led systems for growth: building from zero to one, codifying instinct into operational frameworks and leadership systems designed to make me obsolete. I learned how to build. I also learned how to leave when the time was right.
Act II — The Artist Who Never Left
And then there is the part of me who came first and never left, the one who stood behind the scenes while the builder and the strategist travelled the world. She took the stage when I became a mother, twice, and there I found my deepest reinvention. This part of me writes prose and poetry, shapes metal into jewellery and wheat into bread. A metalsmith, a wordsmith, a homemaker in the oldest and most literal sense: one who makes a home.
It turns out that's the same verb I reach for to describe what community builders do.
We build a home where others feel safe to walk in, take off their shoes, and belong.
Act III — The Hostess Who Keeps the Fire
The hostess sets the table where guests land, drop their shoulders, and lose themselves in conversation with strangers who soon become friends. Everything I build is a version of that table. The journey. The circles. I make the excuse for you to gather and hold the space: a nest where you can recalibrate before taking flight again. A mentor, guide, hostess. I walk with you. I help you find north. And if you need refuge, I keep the fire lit.
Nest & North is my framework for a whole life.
Two intertwined triangles, one that sustains us, one that expresses us, with belonging at the center. I built it to keep myself whole through the hardest season of reinvention I've known. Now it's the architecture beneath how I live, and beneath everything we make here.
Become the main character in your story, and the author of its next chapter.
Write yourself as the protagonist, gain the foresight to shape what's next, and workshop it into an artifact of your own clarity. Through Guided Journeys (cohort, mentoring, or self-paced) or Gatherings (a weekly writing practice), you'll collect lumps of clay (raw writing pieces) that can later be shaped into something tangible: a body of work, a personal manifesto, a memoir in the making.
Guided Clarity Journeys
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A guided journey through your own story, in a circle that becomes a village. Six women, six sessions, three months. Begin in the fall and cross into the new year fully at home with yourself and clear on where you're headed.
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Your own private Clarity Journey: six sessions at a flexible pace, one to one with Laís in a mentorship format: she has walked this road and brings her signature map and frameworks. Three spots, Open enrollment.
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The Clarity Journey for-the-road format. The same six chapters, prompts, and frameworks to move through at your own pace. For when you'd rather begin alone. Coming soon. Join the waitlist.
Free Flow Circle:
the Woolf Pack™
A weekly writing practice in community. Clarity you keep building, wherever you are. And a pack of your own.
Meet the Woolf Pack™: a stream-of-consciousness practice, and a pack to keep you in it.
The name carries two threads: first, Virginia Woolf, who wrote her way down to the current of her own mind; second, the wolf pack, a nod to Clarissa Pinkola Estés and the women who run with the wolves.
Each week we write: no performance, no polish, just the pen moving across the page until something true surfaces. Once a month we gather in person in NYC to workshop our lumps of clay, the pieces worth shaping into a Substack article, your personal website copy, or the memoir you keep almost starting. It's a room of your own and a circle around it: the practice that keeps a light on your path. Clarity you build, on the go.
Our Way
Nest & North is my framework for a whole life.
Two intertwined triangles. One that sustains us, one that expresses us. Six circles around each corner. True Belonging at the centre. I built it to keep myself whole through the hardest season of reinvention I've known. Now it's the architectural foundation for how I live - and for everything we do here. It combines:
Ancient knowledge. The myths, archetypes, and rituals that have mapped the human journey for thousands of years. The stories we keep telling because they keep being true.
Lived experience. My own, and my clients'. Especially the threshold seasons: motherhood, migration, reinvention, the slow work of building and the harder work of letting it go.
Current literature. The writers and researchers reinventing what we know about identity, storytelling, community, belonging, and becoming.
I metabolize all three into something you can actually use.
