Five months of work has come down to this.  Well truthfully, a good portion of the last five months has been spent dragging my feet about this project.  To be honest, I’m scared of failing.   

When I was in my early thirties, I started my first wedding planning business.  Three years later, I started a blog that went viral – HUGE thanks to Twitter.  My being an early adopter of the platform afforded me lots of free advertising through retweets.  Various companies and organizations took note of the organic growth of my blog, leading to some incredible speaking opportunities in the social media and wedding industries. Five years into the new business, I took classes for a year to learn floral design.  Looking back, thirty something me was fearless.  I was hungry to learn new things, meet new people and find my place in the world apart from being a wife and mother. 

 Fifty something me is timid, a realist.  My life responsibilities are fewer now, I like the slower pace.  Still, there is a part of me that craves more, that isn’t satisfied with the status quo. The easy part of a website launch is that I need to be able to be found on the internet.  A place to showcase my event planning, floral and garden design work.  That is the easy part, and that part of the website was completed at least month ago.

The hard part?  The blog.  It is a creature all its own and I am afraid of it.  Will people want to read what I have to say?  I didn’t even graduate college and I somehow think I should be a writer? Hmm.  This will never work.  Do you really have the time to commit to this?  Shouldn’t you be going to the gym instead of sitting at a desk? These are the thoughts that keep me up at night and fill me with doubt. Still, I couldn’t shake the idea of a blog, and when I considered doing a website without one, it felt substandard. Less than idea, boring even.

So here we are! If you have read this far, I thank you.  If you have followed the posts all this week leading up to the launch, I deeply thank you. (Insert deep bow of honor here.) I mostly suspect that if you have followed along this week and are reading this post word for word, you are a dear friend. If some unexplained reason we are not dear friends, then your participation here tells me that we need to be.

Which brings me to the new business name. Kinship & Vine deserves its own explanation, so I’ll break it down into the two key words. . Kinship: The older I get, the more I am blessed by friendships outside of my family. Kinship’ to me, is not limited to familial connections, it is the result of those moments when your very soul connects to another because you have both put in the time to learn that you have similar backgrounds, values, or ideas about the most abstract things. You know the kinship I am speaking of, the kind that makes you lose all sense of time when you are together.

Of course, Vine is the token floral reference here, but with some depth to it.  I have the fondest memories of plucking blooms from honeysuckle vines in the woods behind my childhood home. Pulling the stamen from the bloom to reveal one little tiny drop of nectar.  We have been in our current home for twenty years. Even as a new build, we always had honeysuckle vine growing in the yard. Today, a rather large one is taking over a Leyland cypress tree that sits right off the corner of our front porch  I see it everyday when I sit on the front porch or go out for the mail.  In our back yard, we have muscadine vines, an unruly mess that grows from tree to tree across most of the backyard boundary.  Every year we say we are going to trellis them and every year they remain wild but healthy and growing. This year, I planted a black eyed Susan vine in the flower garden.  I love to watch it climb the trellis, along with its neighbor the cucumber vine and don’t get me started on beans.  I will never NOT grow pole beans again, they are so incredibly fun, giving me new pods every single day. As of this writing, the vine almost completely fills the cattle panel trellis we planted the seeds under.

I share all of that to say, a vine is a good representation of abundant provision.  Always growing, always giving, thriving under the hardest of circumstances. That is what I hope for you and I.  , Whether you are a client, a friend or even an occasional reader, I hope I share something sometime that helps you along your way.  I hope our paths cross in person, I hope we find a kinship, you and I.  Thank you for being here.

p.s. If you’d like to support the blog, please like, share, comment and follow.  You can also sign up for the newsletter.  Initially, I will send one email newsletter on the last day of every month that will recap posts for that month and highlight what topics will be up for the month ahead.