In late July, I got a message I couldn’t believe was real… “would I be interested in operating a space selling my work in the Boston Public Market?” It was downtown, right in the center of the historic tourist and financial district. My first thought was “How honored to be asked, but absolutely not. There’s no way I’m ready.”

But somewhere I knew - this was the wind blowing my way...maybe this is why I decided to do the crazy thing of living in the van in the first place…so I had a little money saved and had no leases or ties weighing me down. 

I took the running  leap - trusting my wings to the unseen currents. I moved out of the 65 square foot van and into a 2800 square foot live/work space. I’d need all that room to hold the supplies and tools for the team I hired to make my designs and sell them.

In December alone, we sold more pieces than I had in the entire previous year. 

In the 6 months between September 2019 and March 2020, my jewelry business tripled in size. I had my own retail location, demand I couldn’t keep up with, a team of people to help me fabricate, sell, and promote, all the stones, beads, and metals I wanted, and a huge studio to make it all happen in.

All I ever wished for came true at a scale I never believed was possible. I was so in love with it all, so thrilled, it nearly killed me. I hadn’t had a day off since July, and it felt like everything was spinning.

be careful what you wish for…

I began the hunt for a new direction, but I couldn’t find a place to start from.

The world - all the habits we knew were in a collective crumbling. How could I make plans?

I was so spent from the growth of the past half-year I had very little reserves - physically or emotionally. 

Trying to be still, trying to not try, trying to sleep with little success. 

I reminded myself each day to end with gratefulness for my health, and the freedom and safety I had where I was.

I would have to trust, heal, and build myself up first. 

For weeks I practiced - incense lit for morning meditation, long wanders in the woods, running sprints to drumming tracks, a mat on the floor of my studio for yoga, a stack of books open, pages and pages in journals.

Little by little, I felt strength and a center build. 

As I slowed down, I realized why I had avoided this rest and the awareness that came with it. I was here, in my home, and I was so very far from the home in my heart. All the success had me chasing something I would never catch. I was moving at a speed so frantic - I felt like I was being hunted.

I wasn’t headed in a direction I chose - I was operating on assumptions I picked up. The assumptions were easier, they were a collective agreement we all seemed to make.

Throughout our upbringing, on all the TV programming, it’s taken as a given that achievement and success means stability and a trajectory towards a continuous more. That maybe if we move a faster, get more efficient, “we’ll get there!”.

But we’re already “here”. Ram Dass has a popularized saying that’s become a mantra - “be here now”. Mmm. The moment. But what do we do here, now? Especially when I seem to be swimming in a void - infinity in all directions?

I felt myself open to the world’s pain - so big and sprawling, and I was so small.

Centuries of hate, war, and oppression. Lives we forgot mattered. How did we even get here? 

But there was only meaning if I did something about what I saw. I caught little pieces of a puzzle every day. Each one alone was interesting, a bit terrifying, sometimes simple and elegant, or beautiful, but where was the common thread? How to weave this all together? … I couldn’t get my head around it… what was I supposed to do?  Where was my path?

With each step I forged and each idea I wrote down, fear came to meet me.

I spun in circles and questioned my sanity until Pocahontas came back again - bringing grandmother willow. 

“All around you are spirits, Child. They live in the Earth, the Water, the Sky.

If you listen, they will guide you.Listen with your heart, you will understand." 

My head couldn’t show me the way. I would have to go into my heart, and trust it.

I realized that to hold what could come next, I would have to completely empty my hands of what I had before. I collected all the inventory. I took them all apart, separating metals into buckets of silver and gold. 

Like I was collecting fire wood…

Mmmhmm. Trust the tree. OK. 😳

[ DISCOVERING THE WHEEL ]

So my self-of-three-decades —

the one who had learned from her dad how to hit a nail as soon as she could hold a hammer, then forged with it her own way in her own way, 

the one whose heart had led her on adventures sleeping in tiny tents and backseats of cars, on the mud floor of a village hut, suspended in a rain forest tree house, huddled over luggage in planes and in trains, out in the open under blankets of stars over deserts and beaches, and then for months in that tiny house she built inside a van,

(her Irish mother did think her crazy) 

the one who had fallen in love, with an exploding star and been set on fire as it burst, then faded from view,

the one who had left behind Midwest streets, bass blasting

to canoe

rivers 

of the

Amazon

listening: 

shamans

singing

to

vines 

and 

spines, 

She sat with her self-of-three-years and asked:

“We’ve collected all this in these trips around the sun.

Now,

How would YOU like to paint with all the colors of the wind?”