Dublin Flowers

The greatest seed-to-flower story I can tell you is my favorite one. To me, it’s a story of magic, manifestation, and the stars aligning in all the right ways.

In September of last year, I was in North Carolina and I sat in Alisha Wielfaert’s living room with a group of women for our Directing Inner Wisdom Business Mastermind. We’d had a lovely few days of inner work and at this particular moment, we were talking about countries and cities we’d visited over the years. I mentioned that my husband and I had been to Japan—Tokyo, to be exact—as that was the number one place he’d wanted to visit. They asked me where my number one place was and I replied, Dublin, Ireland. We hadn’t yet made it there for a variety of reasons, COVID being a main factor, obviously. We moved on from the conversation without another thought.

In another conversation, we talked about plans and visions for our future, and making writing a core focus in my life had been something I’d been wanting to get back to. Not just writing articles and content for my business, but getting deeply entrenched in writing in all aspects. I wanted to be consumed with writing again.

I left North Carolina feeling refreshed, reinvigorated, and inspired.

A day after I got home from that trip to North Carolina, I opened my email to an invitation to apply to a writing workshop… in Dublin, Ireland that was taking place ON my birthday, with an author whose books I’d read and devoured. I had no idea he even taught workshops.

I read the submission requirements and deadline to apply (it was coming up quickly). Then I read the applicant acceptance numbers. Nine. They were accepting only nine people.

My mind went through a series of thoughts:

Omg! This is fate, I should apply! → OMG! There’s no way I could get in → Omg! This could be it though! → I don’t have anything good enough to get in! → What if I did get in though? → What do you have to lose?

The answer was clear: nothing. I really had nothing to lose by applying. It was the first time in my adult life that my confidence and trust in something bigger than me trumped my fear. I felt something deep down in my gut telling me to apply to this workshop. Not just to “try” it and see what happened. Something told me, “you have to do this.”

Earlier in the year, as part of my Rebel MFA Degree, I’d taken a class on The Psychology of Character and used one of my WIP’s Project Riley for the workshop. I got such amazing feedback on it that I decided to use it as the chapter I submitted for my application.

So I got to work polishing the chapter up as much as I could, wrote my application cover letter, and applied. I pulled cards. I journaled. And then I thought to myself: if it’s meant to be, it will happen. If this is as destined as I think it is, it’s going to happen. Things do not line up like this for no reason. Things were just too cosmically aligned… too magical for it not to happen.

Then I waited.

And I waited.

And waited some more.

Then on October 27th, nearly a month after I applied (and nearly a week and a half after they said acceptances would be announced) I got this notification:

You would have thought someone had died by the amount of screaming that came out of my mouth for a good five minutes. In fact, my husband was home over lunch and had brought his co-worker over to visit our zoo (she had been kind enough to watch our cats while we were gone in North Carolina). I’m sure she thought I was insane.

What was crazy though, is that I had a moment of deja vu because I had envisioned that exact moment so many times in the previous weeks… literally felt myself opening the email, reading those words, and feeling those emotions. I had literally put myself into the future me’s place so many times that when it DID happen — it felt like I’d been there before. It didn’t take away from the moment, if anything, it made it feel all the more real. It made me feel… validated.

I knew I had been right all along.

And I don’t say that out of arrogance or some sort of psychic gift. I say it out of this deep, intuitive knowing that I can’t explain. This place of having surrendered totally and completely to this vision that I believed in so fully. If I hadn’t had so many signs of this seed being watered before this point, maybe I wouldn’t have believed it to be so. Maybe I would have ignored all the little guideposts that led me to this point, but I didn’t. I paid attention.

I nurtured and watered and loved that little seed of an idea until it manifested into the flower that it is today.

Last week, I submitted my final chapters to be workshopped by my peers and instructor while I’m in Dublin, the last deadline on my list for the trip and it feels monumental even though it’s nothing compared to the work I’ve done for my Forged in Fire release. And yet… because of the nature of this trip, this little cosmic seedling turned flower, I believe every little thing that comes with it is part of the larger plan.

And I have to believe that there is still so much to blossom when I’m there. I think the moment I step off that plane, things will unfold in a way that I couldn’t have expected and I’m ready for it.

I’m ready for whatever seeds are coming next.