Almost 4 weeks ago now, I came across this beautiful lotus with Svea on a walk within the community where my in-laws live. Svea and I admired its beauty, and I told her that a lotus is one of my favorite flowers. She asked “because it’s so beautiful and colorful?” And I said “yes, that is part of the reason, but the bigger reason it is my favorite flower, is because of the process it has to go through to get to what it becomes before our eyes as the beholder.” She didn’t quite understand at that moment, so I took a moment to explain to her why a lotus is so extraordinary. A lotus does not bloom or show full color, expansion, or it’s magnificence without a complex, difficult process that happens in the muck, in the mud, and in the darkness. A lotus is also known as “mud-born.” It does not simply appear. It begins as a small seed in the darkest depths of the water, in the muck, at the bottom. But it does the work, it believes and knows, and CREATES the vision of becoming something extraordinary, but acknowledges the process it will take in which to get there. To BLOOM.

Anything worth ANYTHING takes work, commitment, grit, failures, pitfalls, lesson after lesson after lesson of learning. It takes creativity, belief, VISION. It takes ACTION, and more action, again and again. It takes doing the things you know you have to do when no one is watching, when no one is telling you you’re doing the right thing, where there may be no validation. Just the belief, grit, heart and actionable steps you KNOW you must take to BLOOM into the BEST version of YOURSELF. And then, you know, that you would do it OVER and OVER again, because the journey to get there, was worth the work in the dark.