This morning is giving me the 'ick'....

✅ Done: 

• Shipping Company Booked
• School applications completed
• Pets Quarantine booked in NZ

⚠️ Pending: 

• Decide on flights
• Book flights
• Sell UK House

❌ Avoided: 

• Decluttering
• Listing clothing on Vinted

I’m sitting here with a thin pen (note to self: never again), a sip of cold coffee, and the stark realisation that June is only 2 months away. 

June is when the work lanyard gets handed in, our UK home gets emptied into a 40ft shipping container, and we catapult ourselves towards New Zealand.

I’ve spent a lot of my life choosing the safe(ish) path, being a chameleon, shifting myself to match whatever wall I was leaning against.

But all of a sudden, I'm not leaning against a wall.

In my Morning Pages* last week, I realised that this imminent relocation is an excellent opportunity, and I don't want to be a chameleon anymore.  I think I'd rather be a lighthouse.

I’ve always been rather partial to a lighthouse, I even have a tattoo of one.  They don’t run around the beach trying to find ships to save, grabbing the helm and steering them to safety. They don't shift their foundations because a boat is refusing to cooperate. They are just… there. Strong. Dependable. Reassuring.

They just shine.

If I was a lighthouse, I’d be positioned somewhere between a jagged cliff and where you’d normally find a windmill, in a sunny, rolling field.  I’m probably painted in colours that stand out like a sore stripey thumb, but hey, that is my primary purpose.

As I prepare for the move to the other side of the world, I’ve realised my job isn't to control the storm, it’s to:

1. Polish the glass

2. Change the bulbs

3. Get rid of the cobwebs

4. Tune into the universe (my actual power socket)

I took some of my homemade spell jars and bath salts to my essential oil workshop last weekend and sold almost all of them.  Then it hit me: people don’t just want products. They want the "essential oil" of us—our core essence, our beliefs, our weirdness, our quirks, our permission.

So, here’s to the leap. Here’s to the Apothecary. And here is to being a stripy lighthouse in a world of grey windmills.

Notes:

*Morning Pages: The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron