"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.

I have always been many people, and for most of my life I thought I had to choose between them. The strategist hid the poet. The founder resented the mother. The globetrotting entrepreneur judged the homemaker. The world demanded a single definition 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 chose to build a category-defining self, to hold my breath through my contradictions long enough that the separate pieces locked into one cohesive, unprecedented whole.

I chose to build a life spacious enough to hold my multitudes.

Now I create experiences to help others become their fullest version.

PROLOGUE

I write this memory from my desk across the Raritan Bay.

At eighteen, I went to see plays every week in a one-theater town, the programming sparse. Then I moved to Belo Horizonte, where I spent my scarce student budget on espresso at the café in the Palácio das Artes, a five-minute escape from the imposing, decaying Law School building, and a trade for a feeling I couldn't yet name: belonging.

At twenty, I carried a pocket-sized watercolor kit in my carry-on to Mauritius and painted a nonprofit's expansion strategy. I didn't know then that within a year I'd drop out of college to become its president for Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay.

Now I live a ferry ride from Broadway, design tarot-based go-to-market strategies for global startups, and paint frameworks for a whole life with that same kit.

FOUNDER STORY

The Builder Who Learned to Leave

ACT I

The one who builds. 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.

The Artist Who Learned to Stay

ACT II

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.

The Bridge That Holds it All

ACT III

That is where all parts of me meet: through community. 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, a guide, a hostess. I walk with you. I help you find north. And if you need refuge, I keep the fire lit.

I am not the mother or the founder, the homemaker or the breadwinner, the builder or the artist. I am where all of them meet.

To hold all of it, I built Nest & North.

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 foundation for how I live, and for everything we do here.

It combines:

  • The myths, archetypes, and rituals that have mapped the human journey for thousands of years.

  • Mine and my clients', especially the threshold seasons: motherhood, migration, reinvention.

  • The writers and researchers reinventing what we know about identity, storytelling, community, belonging, and becoming.

I metabolize all three into a creative practice that enables clarity.

Become the main character in your story, and the author of its next chapter.

You weren't born to live by someone else's standards, but to trailblaze new ways of being that wouldn't exist without you.

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 or mentoring), the Workbook (self-paced), or the Woolf Pack (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.

Writing yourself into clarity is where it begins.

Join 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.

Get Started 
Signature Journeys

The journeys I built to find my own way home, now opened to you: different doors into the same work, where you write yourself into clarity.

One Clarity Journey,
Three Ways

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

Learn More

Let’s talk.

Coffee's on me.