Permission to Play Hooky

How to get unstuck in your soul when life feels static, overwhelming or worse of all - boring & hard.

Note: This is part of an ongoing series for a work-in-progress manuscript titled, Permission Slips. It’s prob publishing suicide to REVEAL that before it’s concrete, but I’m not here for traditional or filtered and I told you this would be the cutting room floor. In this series, we will dive into varies areas of our life, where we as women, oftentimes need a sister to hand us a permission slip. I’m not an expert by any stretch, nor am I even an authority to be the one to give you PERMISSION to live your life - and yet, I find in my conversations with women, we’re oftentimes searching for that friend to just give us permission to do what we already know intuitively to do. So if that’s what you need, I’m happy to be the one to grant you permission. Would love your feedback on each of these as we go along - they are at this point only for paid subscribers, so your feedback is invaluable as my most trusted readers.

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In the regenerative farming world (the method in which all wines & coffee are produced from Scout & Cellar), there is this thing called a cover crop. Sounds really gardeny and green thumby, which if you know me well, I am most definitely NOT, but stick with me because when I learned about the purpose of a cover crop, I nearly wept it is so beautiful.

A cover crop is planted to protect the soil, and its purpose is to enrich the soil, create diversity within it, and enhance the overall nutrients. This is different from a cash crop - or a plant that is planted to harvest. An example of a cash crop would be wheat, corn, strawberries – these have specific seeds and the intent is always for production & picking. Cover crops on the other hand are never intended to be harvested. A regenerative farmer plants a cover crop simply to be there to protect, enrich, enhance, & make the soil better for future harvests of other crops. In other words, cover crops are meant to enhance the cash crops.

I began my journey into entrepreneurship several years back as I was searching for purpose outside of motherhood. I needed something for me that would fit into the sporadic and unpredictable pockets of my day called nap time and the occasional holy grail – bedtime + quiet house. In the beginning, these outlets and ventures weren’t really business-focused but rather more cover crop focused. If motherhood was my cash crop, refinishing furniture or taking OOTD pictures of myself were my cover crops. As the kids started growing, my yearning and longing to access more of my brain started rearing it’s head. I knew that a shift in me was happening as MORE was needing to be birthed. So I dove headfirst into learning how to build a business online.

It was April 2020, we were deep in the heart of actual quarantine & Covid (which, living in Seattle was a whole form of trauma that we can unpack over a glass of wine later) and a business opportunity to start something online fell into my lap.

One month into learning this new way to build & grow, and I was hooked.

All of the things that had been dormant inside of me for years as a SAHM, were finally getting their time to shine again. The parts of me that motherhood had ‘cash cropped’, were coming back in full force. I felt alive again as the fire within began to ignite in loud & creative ways that I couldn’t ignore. My husband commented on it first, “that I seemed more like me”. More like the woman he had fallen in love with - the powerhouse, confident, tenacious gal that was running entire departments for a giant fashion brand in her early twenties. Most of the people in the current season had simply known me as a mom…and most days, a hot mess express mom.