💌 Love Letters 💌 no.3

To April, with love

April rolled in with a thunderstorm. The humidity lingered in the air making my hands sticky and the pollen melted over everything like an icecream dropped on hot concrete.

If last month was about “trusting the seeds” I was planting, April was about waiting for them to sprout.

Trusting the seeds was about feeling confident about the ideas and projects I was pursuing. I had a vision for my life and how it would go. I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t a tinge of disappointment that my present moment looks so far from the dreams God let me dream.

In the months since I started finally feeling more at home in my body and safe to start moving around with the full force of my ambition, I’ve been boots on the ground trying to get back into my work. My work being, freelance artist-ing.

I’m ashamed to admit I’d hoped that the Universe would give me something between a gold star and a Get Out of Jail Free card and promptly provide a paying project for me once I started emailing people and taking meetings. I hit the ground running and planned a networking trip to NY. I (begrudgingly) dedicated Mondays as my “Admin Day”. I started giving myself assignments and deadlines and new hats to wear in the hopes that God would take notice of all my hard work and resilience.

I pursued the opportunities I was creating— I found myself having several promising conversations, navigating potential projects, and developing more creative concepts than I could count. I planted A LOT of seeds I wasn’t planning to and I trusted something would root. But I guess some flowers just take longer to bloom.

Every day I would start with a prayer:

“Please, today, let there be something to harvest.”

I would water my seeds daily with buckets of hope but with each passing day, I felt like the dirt was drier; the clock beating me up like the sun wilting everything away.

My buckets of hope turned into sweat and tears. My faith ran out and April found me curled into a ball on the floor— nothing left to give.

It wasn’t just the months of this year alone. It felt like the culmination of a disappointment that had started brewing around the time I turned 27 and piece by piece, everything began to implode.

I know it’s textbook Saturn Return and I keep throwing tantrums, screaming at the sky “You’ve made your point, let’s wrap this up now don’t You think!!!”. The fact that we all go through quarter and mid-life crises doesn’t comfort me when I’m like this. I validate myself by sobbing “I’m not made of effing steel”.

Yet.

God pursues me HARD. When I get to these moments— I call them my “Sit On the Floor of the Airport and Give Up” moments (famously coined from a time when I literally did this while traveling home with my friend)— I notice that people come to my rescue. I start to see license plates that say “U R MAGIC” (I am NOT even kidding) and little by little, the light that had gone out starts to flicker again.

April reminded me that my job is to plant the seeds.
Beyond that, who am I to tell them when to bloom?

Comparing your harvest to others is fruitless. Your seeds will sprout only when they are ready. Only when YOU are ready.

April gave me the space to fall to my lowest point. It’s a place I don’t relish going to… it’s dark, damp, and vacant. Nothing thrives there— it’s a terrifying pit of despair where my thoughts become monsters capable of killing all my hopes and dreams.

I’m thankful to say I’ve been to this place only a few times in my life, and it really only started in recent years. It’s the kind of hole that requires energy beyond myself to get me out of it, so I’m grateful that the Universe still needs me in The Great Plan. I don’t know how else to explain the supernatural love that conspires to pull me out. I come out of this hole soft, exhausted, and bruised. But as every day passes, my loved ones hold me up and I lean into grace, I nourish myself back to life.

We all know, or maybe have been told at least once in our lives, that sometimes we have to lose everything— get stripped down to nothing— in order to build a stronger foundation than before.

I closed April’s chapter, quietly and a little embarrassed by my meltdown. I slowly start filling my buckets with hope and I take note of every person that believes in me even when I don’t have the strength to. I flip through my camera roll and look at all the signs of magic, documented for this one purpose. And eventually, confidence starts to flicker and grow— I’m ready to keep going and get back in the game.

Magic Documented

from my field journal