Butterflies!
No, not those butterflies, although I advocate for them strongly- I mean the sort of scared to your stomach yet still happy butterflies. The feeling you get in the pit of your stomach that makes you feel almost sick with elation. This is a feeling that I get when I think of the very big risks that I’m taking by leaping into this business, while also imagining all of the rewards that I know I’m capable of reaping. I started thinking about this feeling while listening to a podcast not long ago.
Two women, both flower farmers, were discussing how they got started in the business. They both talked about manifesting what was, essentially, a dream or vision of some kind. I think what they were both getting down to was that they had an incredible calling to do this, and following that calling has brought them their success, despite their “butterflies”. It had me wondering about what I’m called to do, and is it this flower farming thing? I pushed that aside and focused on bringing to light what joy I was going to feel by accomplishing my goals as a business. I focused on fortitude and manifesting my ideas in to reality.
Then one late afternoon, as we had some of our first snowflakes of the winter falling around me, I was brought back to a memory. This memory came back to me while I was out in the barn, one of my absolute favorite places to be in the winter. I was enjoying my animals and their happy munching of fresh hay, a moment that I often savor as I look around at our property from the barn. As I was looking around, I was having an extreme moment of gratitude right as my eyes scanned a certain area of our pasture. This is where I found the memory. That memory, was of a moment of calling.
Of course, I didn’t know what it meant at the time, as things like this usually go. When my husband and I had been living together on our property for about a year, before children, I was walking out in the pasture. We often did this, as our flock of sheep was much smaller, we were acclimating the horses and liked being around them, and we had no small children to chase after. It was a beautiful almost fall afternoon, just before sunset- the golden hour. We had no barn, no run in, no structures of any kind, just grass and animals. I remember a very slight breeze, just enough to bring on all the smells full force. Smells are my strongest memory trigger, and therefore memory maker. This is when I came to a moment of complete ease and belonging. I knew that I was where I belonged. I accepted this fully and it brought pure happiness to my core. I was home.
I’ve never told anyone about that moment before- yes, to keep it for myself, but also because it didn’t seem important to anyone but me. I’ve never forgotten that moment, but I’ve also never tried to evaluate it further. I understood that I was home, and I continued to build that home with my husband and children. I didn’t think about how that feeling not only lead to building my family, but everything that is now to come in our lives! Everything that I, and my family, were meant to do can be traced back to that memory and that feeling. It was a calling to build my life here on this property, which has lead to this exact place in time that now holds a flower farm.
Now, back to those butterflies. They were another feeling that I can trace back and know that they helped push me, simply because of their existence. Once I got the nudge from my husband to go for it with this flower farm business, and things started getting more real, I started having major feelings of anxiety. Except this was different than the usual dread that comes with anxiety. This anxiety also shared excitement. It was like a fear that made me shake with exhilaration. I’ve had this feeling before, but it is usually in a short lived situation. This was a feeling that was coming back every day, every time I looked at anything flower farm related. I knew this feeling, just like the one in the pasture, was important. Half of me is going to do the same thing that I did in the pasture all those years ago; continue and keep building. Take the good feelings and follow them! The other half of me is humble enough to understand that I can’t possibly know how these moments will look to the future version of myself, just as I didn’t see how grand of a future that moment in the pasture was going to bring me.
