Rarely are people born with gifts.

It is love that gives them the path to persevere and discover those gifts.

It goes something like this…

You fall in love with something...like creating jewelry for example. Something about the possibility of making a meaningful talisman and putting it out into the world resonates with you.

And so you begin. You drive 10 hours, in a horrible rainstorm, to spend the weekend learning... You are horrible at it.

You first piece is so bad that even your teacher chuckles at it. You cannot erase from your memory the look of pity on her face.

Driving home, you notice that there are cuts on every finger of your hands and you also, as an added bonus you have managed to bang your engagement ring diamond with some kind of random tool and take a large chunk out of it. It is now ruined.

But yet you persevere. Because love is involved and in my case that usually just makes me more stubborn.

So you find another class to take. It was all going pretty well until the part where we were all gathered around the teacher to learn soldering. A big scary flame and a tank of gas in a cabinet. What could go wrong? Well, her torch wouldn't light...and instead of checking why...she kept trying.

And then the tank exploded. I was picked up and thrown off my feet about 10 feet and the only reason I stopped was I hit a wall. Everyone else that had been gathered around was also thrown. The teacher was completely on fire, her clothes burning off of her. And some brave guy in the class ran over to the tank, which was also on fire, and turned it off with his bare hands. If he had not done that we would all be dead. The building would have exploded.

Now any sane person would have taken all of these things as a sign...that perhaps this was not for me. But I kept going. Kept learning. Kept discovering. Experimenting.

Because I had a vision of things I wanted to create. The beauty I wanted to bring into the world. And so here I am...20 years later. Making jewelry and still afraid of fire. I am still loving it and still learning. Inventing. And mindfully making slow batch jewelry for y’all.

What I have learned is that it is not so much about having a gift as it is about having grit.