Your Life can Always Start Again

The other day I saw a miracle. To explain the miracle, though, I need to take you back to last year…

One night, late last summer, a humongous windstorm ripped across the spine of our mountain. The next day I was walking my favorite trail to the ridge when I turned the corner and stopped in my tracks. A gorgeous, stately maple had fallen overnight, ripped down across the path.

Its leaves were already drooping, wide roots torn from the ground. I stood among the disaster, touching the trunk sadly and saying goodbye.

All last winter I slid past the latticework of the maple’s empty branches, still lying across the trail, my heart aching for this ending.

Then, the miracle happened…

Last week, as I was busily looking down at a dusting of spring wildflowers, I turned the corner and stopped, stilling with shock—

There was the maple, absolutely dotted in green.

The palms of its new leaves were budding out in all directions, as if a choir clapping. The tree—the same one I thought was un-rescuable— was alive, entire, beginning again.

There has been so many times in my life when I thought it wouldn’t be possible to start over. When the hurt was too big, the change too abrupt, the ending too severe. Times when it felt like I had lost something too essential to be regained…

But the plants show me, over and over, that life—your life—can always start again.

I’ve lost count of the amount of times the living world has helped me start over.

When I was first diagnosed with chronic pain and was told there was no recourse.

When I decided to leave my entire life behind in New York City and become an herbalist in the Blue Ridge mountains (a career I knew nothing about).

When I caught Lyme disease and spiraled into chronic illness.

When the biggest relationships of my life ended.

When the pandemic descended.

When my child was born.

Every time a windstorm rips through my life, changing the very landscape beneath me, a part of me can’t help but believe that this must be the end…

But all I have to do is reach out to the living world—sit with a maple, make a flower essence, ask to dream with the moss—and I’m shown that there is a new reality waiting for me on the other side of this moment.

Because no matter how much has changed or how different the terrain of your life becomes, the plants will remind you—you can always begin again.

In fact, it’s already happening. Your new life is already seeded in the soil of who you are. All it takes is tapping into the wellspring of magic that lives in the earth and you can watch what has already been planted unfurl.

If you’ve been moving through a time of big change and are ready to initiate a new beginning—with help from the Earth—come join me for Intuitive Plant Medicine (and get $100 off the program).

This deep, life-shifting online course was specifically designed to help you open a whole new era through your own direct connection to the living world.

I’m always amazed by just how many folks have reached out to say that this was the program that changed everything for them…