Relocation

| LOCATION: Lying on a bench in the Starbuck’s in Chiangi Singapore Airport waiting for 7 am |

As I prepared to be out of the country again for several months with the loosest of plans, I kept feeling the pull to stay home.

“Your bed is SO comfortable… It’s the only thing you miss when you’re gone.”

Or the little half-thoughts, “There’s so much to do with your company. So much easier to stay on track if you’re just here instead.”

“Cozy……”

“How much less stressful will it be–no packing!! Everything you need already right here. No getting ready to sublet. You’re right at the crunch-time of your rebrand, you could just wait–”

“How many hours of flying?!!”

A dear friend said last week, Carmell, you’re living the life so many want to live. And I asked him, Really?!

The truth is, every great kind of life requires sacrifice of some sort. And from what I’ve learned, that ALWAYS includes sacrificing comfort.

From the outside, our life may look like business as usual or it may appear glamorous, but if it is something great, you will find sacrifice in it.

I don’t use this word lightly. I’m not a martyr or a victim.

I choose in.

It took only 7 hours into my 30 hours of flying–I was somewhere over the North Pacific toward Russia–that I felt the shift. The return of my hard-won love affair with Relocation.

Leaving where I am for something new again, struggles and challenges in the simplest daily needs, wonder and creativity off the charts. The anxiety (and exhilaration) of not knowing.

I write this as I made it by minutes onto my Tokyo–Singapore leg, then spent the last 4 hours sleeping on the Starbucks sofa from 1:30-4:30 am waiting to check in for my 7 am flight. Last leg 😉

We all long for home. But that’s not the same as comfort. And confusing those two might keep us comfortably stranded on a tiny familiar island for years or decades, dreaming and never doing.

#adventuroussoul
#relocation
#agreatliferequiressacrificingcomfort
#lifeartist

Kindness Never Runs Late

| LOCATION: Sitting in utter relief waiting for United Flight 632 at? |

Arrived just in time at JFK, looking for the United terminal…

There is no United terminal at JFK.

But there is at LaGuardia.

A terrified and frantic taxi ride later, I checked in one minute late to get my bag on the plane… And they said Yes!!

I am thanking God and the universe and all the powers that be for my beautiful, steel – nerved taxi driver with his old big band music playing, and the crisp New York air, and my total trust as he wove us expertly through New York rush hour traffic and pulled up at 5:05 on the dot ❤️🙏🏽😅

I want to mention that as we were stopped at a light waiting, a homeless man with a sign saying he was hungry, was standing to the side. My driver silently rolled down his window, picked up the tied bag of carry-out food ready for his own meal, and waving the man over, handed it to him with a smile and well wishes. My heart was too full for words.

I thought as we waited for light after light to change, I wouldn’t have missed that moment. The same deep effort at life he was putting into getting me to LaGuardia was what he quietly offered to the man on the sidewalk in the midst of our rush.

Thank you to the United check-in duo who got me in and through instantly! I said to her as I ran for security, “That is a ONE-TIME mistake. Period.”

We laughed!

#relief
#onmyway
#adventurousself

WARNING: Carmell’s 2015

| LOCATION: Looking down at the Black Sea from 36,000 feet, flying from Indonesia back to U.S. after 3 months away. |

VISION.

I’ve been staying in Amed. A quiet hardly-touristed village on the upper eastern coast of Bali as 2015 ended.

I like to look at my year not in terms of what I’m going to change or better, but in terms of what I want to build, create, experience, support, and grow. The truth is, I really love who I am just as I am. That’s the life I want to experience.

I’d returned in Dec. 2014 from 3 months traveling Europe to open up the next chapter of my life (it’s what I do) and working as I went–a huge leap of faith outside my comfort zone. I had decided for 2015 I would complete my book, launch my international retreats, and begin taking my business global. …I had NO IDEA what was about to happen!

ADVENTURE.

This is what happened. #highlights

February:

Fell in love with a professional community of women entrepreneurs #eWomenNetwork
Decided on one February afternoon to go to India for the 1st time that May
Submitted to TED-x SLC.

March:

With a day’s notice, jumped into Bridget Cook Burch’s Inspired Writers’ treats. (thanks Heather Laughter)
Took on the NY Times Bestselling author Bridget Cook Burch as my book coach.
Began creating my international women’s retreats

April:

Major progress on my BOOK!
Forgiveness and Yoga Retreat
Emily London Miller photoshoot 2 days before leaving for India

May:

Spent my birthday in Frankfurt Germany with my sister Rachel Bessey
Attended the Women’s Economic Forum in Goa India with women from 25 countries.
Traveled alone without a plan in India (which it turns out is hard to do)

June:

Traveled the Rhine Valley in Germany.
Returned to the US and created the India Inner Journey Retreat for October 2015.
Family Reunion, Bear Lake Utah.

July:

Joined the All Ladies League as U.S. Chairperson for Travel and Influence
Performed marriage of Rachel and Mayk in SLC

August:

Had my first booth at the E-Women Network’s International Conference in Dallas where I launched my India Retreat (thank you Patricia Thompson!)
Performed marriage of Kate and Nick in Millcreek Canyon

September:

Worked with so many of my beloved friends and clients at the doTERRA Convention (this year, the largest convention SLC had ever held)
Created the SLC launch of Oprah’s Belief Series with Tia Walker (whom I met in India)
Booked the Rose Wagner Theater for the event I was producing!
Had my name on an ArtTix ticket with Oprah Winfrey!#didnotseethatcoming
Worked with documentary filmmaker Heidi Gress in creating a short doc of local people and their incredible lives for our Beyond Belief event

October:


Participated in the Parliament of the World’s Religions SLC
Interviewed ‘The Grandmothers’
Beyond Belief was an incredible success Oct. 19th. THANK YOU to all the amazing performers and people who worked to make it happen!!
Left 2 days later for 3 months to India and southeast Asia (packed in under 20 hours).
Amazing Success with my India Inner Journey Retreat!! (Thank you Mansi Mahajan and family!!)
Discovered I don’t move like a white girl #Bollywood 😉

November:

Diwali (largest celebration of the year) with my Indian family
Traveled to the Himalayas and to the southern beaches of Goa in India to begin restoring myself.
One night in Bangkok. (which was actually 2 nights)
Arrived in Bali.
Rode a scooter through the backroads of Bali, received the Blessing from the Water Priestess in the mountains, watched the Barong ceremony in Padang Bai.

November/December/January:

Bali. Finishing my book. Creating and launching my Bali Retreat. Spiritual adventures. Balinese family. Coaching young female Balinese entrepreneurs. Scuba diving for the first time (faced my fear). Restoring myself.

PERSPECTIVE.

NONE of this was on my radar a year ago.

If you’re quite serious about living a dream you’ve had, write it down and begin taking 1 action today toward opening the space for it to happen. Be willing to let go of where you are. When you jump, BOTH feet must leave the ground. It’s the only way.

Anything is possible from where I stand now. I just look at my year and decide what I want to create or make happen in it. Then let go of How and start with first steps. One at a time.

I focus instead on living today what I want to experience. Create what thrills me. Make a living at it to support living free, which really just means living from my heart. It truly is more simple than people realize. It’s just where we put our gravity.

If it’s on security, then that determines pretty much everything. The velvet handcuffs of my comfort zone. If it’s on living my heart’s desires, well… then it becomes easier to test the waters of risk and passion and learn how to swim in them.

The worst that could happen is I fail and have to start fresh. I’ve done it already. You’ve done it too. Not the worst situation we’ve been in…

I let go of all the “insurance” mentality because it’s all bull***t anyway. I get on a scooter and ride in Balinese town traffic or along cliffs without guard rails (I’m afraid of heights)! I head out to the other side of the world without a plan, but with a purpose. Start new big projects without having done them before. Ride in India traffic in tuk tuks and cars without seatbelts because there aren’t any.

There’s something in realizing the world doesn’t insure life, it just lives it.

Hummingirl Jane

| LOCATION: …relocated |

I told the universe, “I’m DONE.”

And I meant it. I had had an unexpected and painful parting of ways with a new love interest who was also an old friend. My 3-year relationship before that had ended only a few months earlier like the last air of hope leaving a slowly deflating balloon.

Then, a few days ago, I was out running in the July evening in my neighborhood when I paused to take a phone call from a client. As I spoke with her walking down a street I never take, I paused for a minute, standing in the road.

Focused on my phone call, my gaze moved unthinkingly down to the pavement around my feet–and I was caught! By what?– My brain registered tiny eyes looking up at me from a tiny body. A hummingbird!

I excused myself from my client and bent down, carefully reaching out to her. She didn’t flinch. I softly picked her up in my palm. She continued to gaze at me, her delicate body breathing the fast regular hummingbird pace.

Almost intuitively, I realized she’d been absorbing the heat from the concrete as the evening grew cool. Finding her that way, she seemed stuck, somehow. I gently closed my hand around her to hold in her warmth.

I immediately looked to the neighborhood. What would I do with her? That lightning quick calculation that I had to pause my life to renegotiate everything for her in the next few hours–the next 24 hours… and how long after?… To see to her care. I knew I wouldn’t just deposit her in a tree and hope for the best.

But I didn’t know what to do.

“Well she needs to eat, Carmell,” I said to myself. “Hummingbird metabolisms require constant food.” In a surreal shift of reality, I walked across the street and into the yard of an arts and crafts style home with beautifully manicured gardens hoping to find someone home who might help me.

Along the drive were golden trumpet vines in full bloom and I thought to stop. I held my tiny soft bundle up to a buttery yellow trumpet flower and silently gasped. Her little tongue extended faster than my eye could track, snaking into the depths of the flower and drinking, pulling back into her long thin beak, extending again and again.

I never thought of a hummingbird’s beak as ‘a beak.’ A beak seems like a much more substantial, possibly-dangerous-to-humans kind of appendage and this was so damn delicate!

She sat, a tiny raja on my palm as I lifted her from flower to flower to drink the nectar. I watched her in awe. “Oh my god, I’m holding a hummingbird as she feeds FROM FLOWERS?!?!!…” I mean, really! Five minutes ago, I was discussing training possibilities with a client for her team, getting my run in, and heading back home to an evening of work at my desk.

Now I was in a garden, holding a juvenile hummingbird, remapping my foreseeable hours and days to support the little life sitting in my hand, bright black eyes silently observing me.

 

I fed her sugar-water every hour through the evening and late into the night. She perched on my finger under the warm lamplight as I sat at my desk. I’d dip my finger into the ziplock of sugar-water and hold it in front of her waiting beak. Her impossibly long thin tongue continued to lick out and suck the nourishment from my finger.

I was captivated. Captive.

I named her Hummingirl Jane.

She sat on my desk that night for hours, looking up at me with clear dark eyes and utter trust. No creature I’ve rescued has looked at me like that.

.

I left her under the heat lamp for a few hours sleep, getting up to feed her and check on her. The next morning I carried her in her clean cardboard restaurant take-away box, into the bedroom as I was getting ready. She suddenly took flight! And my ceiling fan was on!! I panicked, turning off the fan and luckily catching her without injury. Apparently she could fly.

This was simultaneously relieving–and a nerve-wracking new development in her care.

My little companion, that day. Feeding her calmly as I sat in video sessions with clients; her sitting contentedly on my left index finger as I wrote client notes with my right hand. She preferred being perched there, little head darting back and forth, taking everything in.

My heart couldn’t help falling.


>

I had located Wasatch Exotic Pet Care. They would take her and give her the proper proteins a juvenile hummingbird needs, before handing her to Wildlife Rehab who would make sure she safely re-entered her migratory pattern, her free life…

I drove her there, that afternoon; beautiful tiny Hummingirl Jane.

For less than 24 hours, my whole world had changed… And my whole world changed in less than 24 hours.

When I picked her up, I didn’t know what to do, what she would require, how long I would be committing to… I had a choice then. And I carried her home.

At the counter in Wasatch Exotic Pet, I held her perched on my finger for longer and longer as she looked trustingly into my eyes. Even the vet techs commented on her total attention with me. My heart actually ached to let her go. It seems ridiculous, maybe. Except it’s true.

Her empty box sat on the car seat next to me as I drove home. And then life–as it was. But not me as I was. We don’t know how long some magic will continue with us. And we’ll never be able to calculate how we will be changed forever after.

Sometimes, Life relocates us.

I say, Let go. Be relocated. Be soft and captivated and lost and unknowing. Just… be there.

Meaning of Life

| LOCATION: At the counter in the Kitchen of My Life, asking “What’s for dinner?” |

When people talk about answering the question of why they’re here, it always sounds like we expect it to be one thing.

Like, “I’m here to have dinner. Once I decide on, prepare, and eat that meal, it’s done and that’s all there is. I just want it to be “the RIGHT meal.” We put off grocery shopping or trying new foods, eating the same boring things every day or even fasting until we can decide on that One. Right. Meal.

A friend said to me today, “You seem to really know why you’re here. I’m so glad you figured that out!” with the implication that he was still searching and uncertain. I laughed. No matter how clear I get about why I choose to be here, I’m always still asking.

If we’re really honest, I think we always are.

I want to taste as many simple or gourmet, ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ meals as I can fit into this crazy go on the planet. And to share them with a lot of people.

There’s a purpose in there somewhere. 😉

Adventures Are Not For the Faint of Heart

| LOCATION: On a cliff terrace facing the night storm over the Mediterranean, Vernazza, Italy |

I sat out on the quay today writing in the sun, for hours. I knew the storm was coming. The town was only half open–half alive, as though it knew to prepare for something the rest of us were foreigners to. My stomach was in knots–would I be able to show up?

I’d made 3 different backup plans for wifi for my session tonight. The clouds were alternately ominous and majestic as they ran breathless over the top of our little village. As the sun fell, the storms threw the sunset into sharp beauty. And still we all waited, the sky growing dark.

Shops were closing early. I bought wifi time at the only wifi cafe for my mastermind group tonight. And as the cafe closed up, I sat down on the cobbled street outside the door, under an awning, and logged in. The rain started, thunder and wind, as our group came online.

“Where are you?” I panned the webcam down the lonely dark street with lamps lit. “Is that Italy?!” Yes. A small village with NO cars–I can touch the houses on both sides of the streets when I stretch out my arms.

We had an incredible session as the rain pelted sideways and I had to wipe it from my screen. The faithful church bells called the hour, the half hour and the new hour. Looking at me strangely, people scrambled last minute to dry, lit homes behind shuttered windows. My focus was on the seven people on my screen.

I was numb from cold and sitting on cobblestone for nearly 2 hours when I (very) slowly stood up, packed up, and went in search of a last open cafe for a hot drink.

The storm had taken a small intermission.

After being severely warned of power outages, I was thankful to find I had electricity when I arrived at my terraced room on the cliff over the ocean.

I stand alone now in the dark doorway wrapped in a blanket and watching the Mediterranean rage below me as the rain whips across me unrepentently.
……………

And I leave on the early train tomorrow for Florence to prepare myself there for clients, then meeting up with friends I will stay with that I made on my trip 2 years ago.

Immediately, Wednesday morning, I fly to Madrid. The Prado awaits–a dream of many years.

A young woman with her friend on the quay this afternoon, traveling as students, said, “Traveling is really hard. You think you’re going to have this phenomenal time–and you do–but it takes so much to do it. More than you expect or think.” I smiled sympathetically as she said it.

I could relate.

Exquisite moments. Amidst lots of angst and effort and anxiety about where I will sleep tomorrow night… It’s the struggle that makes the journey powerful. It’s the effort to show up and experience everything we can, that opens wide the inner transformation.

Vacation is a reprieve from the daily routine. Traveling literally moves us from where we are to somewhere new–from the person we were to the person we become.

We meet the unexpected. We put ourselves over and over right into the center of the unknown and ask boldly or timidly for what comes next… But we ask.

I love to weave the magical spell with pictures and words of all I am experiencing. And it is all that! And so much more… But the webs that bring the magic together, often quickly dismissed or overlooked, are the struggle and the questioning–the anxiety and stress inherent in not staying in one place longer than a few days, not knowing where we will sleep tomorrow. Trusting life with the next step.

Something incredible will be there.