As I usher in my 33rd year of life, I am facing a new set of blank pages.
Ryan’s manuscript is complete.
We sent it off in the middle of the night, with tiredness clinging to our eyelids and exhaustion blurring the pages. We let it go to the darkness; to the ethers of the internet. Its fate now rests with our editor, and the same faith that trusts springtime buds will bloom and snow will blanket the earth in winter.
I feel like a weight has been lifted, but I also feel an emptiness.
This project has colored my time for the better part of a year. It has become my morning star, my muse, my heartbeat. I loved it so much that I let it be my world. And as much life as I have breathed into it, it has breathed into me.
I have wanted to write a book for as long as I can remember.
When I was little and wild, I whispered to the wind and smashed berries in the forest and told myself stories. Mostly, I made them up, about my imaginary world in the woods. A constant stream of words scrolled across my mind and I would give them a voice, a totem to my lived experience.
It was in the forest that a dream to write was born and I soon swapped out berries for the beginnings of chapters curling my notebook pages. Eventually, the pages went flat and blank, because it’s easier to start writing a book than it is to finish.
Still, over the years, I started new projects with forgetfulness and fresh hope for something different, only for this pattern to suffocate each and every one of them. Skeletons of stories blew like tumbleweed around my brain—a reminder that my dream was unfinished and uncreated.
It wasn’t until Ryan that everything changed.
This man came with a skeleton and asked me to give it life and I did. And through this process, I have made a dream come true. I have woken up to a purpose and a path I long forgot since sending whispers on the wind: Telling stories.
As I sit with this empty space and a near half empty coaching practice, the old me would jump into action with the force of fifty men.
Serve. Market. Serve. Get your business together.
But the new me desires slowness. She desires flow and intention, surrender and synchronicity. She wants to dig her heels into the earth and look up at the light slanting through the palms.
She wants to know: What wants to be written next on these blank, cream-colored pages?
When I drop in, it’s always the same message: Just write.
Write the second book.
And then write your own.
And then keep writing books together.
So, for now, I will listen.
Perhaps the same force that makes the wind come alive is whispering this message to me now.
Or maybe, its the wind that remembers my whispers.
Maybe the voice it’s carrying is my own
—that of the little girl’s in the forest, telling herself stories 💜
With love & inspiration,
-Kayla
WANDER THE WORLD WITH ME?
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