“A great friend looks past your broken fence to see the flowers you’ve grown in your garden.”
Anon
Hello petals,
Welcome back to another ‘behind the scenes’ of my business post. These posts come out on the second weekend of the month usually and are for paid subscribers. If you want to join us I’m holding space for intention setting and bedding in this week. It’s on New Moon;
WORKSHOP ONE of FOUR - 11th January at 12noon . More details here.
🌚
I’ve found it really hard to sit down and find the words to write this one.
BUT I finally have an explanation of sorts.
So as some of you will know my ‘word of 2023’ was ‘bloom’. I decided to launch ‘Project Bloom’ as part of that and have been writing you seasonal updates about the opportunities and things that I’ve attracted in.
As I write this we are a fair way off (few thousand pounds off) the target of our crowd funding campaign for ‘The Soil Web’. Support us here if you’d like from as little as £3.
It’s kind of embarrassing 🙈 but here’s what I know;
I’ve never run a crowd funding campaign before but I’ve supported other peoples sometimes with hundreds of pounds over the years.
We have 20 or so days left.
It’s match funded by the LA (up to £1000) if we reach 20 backers which we’ve done. 🎉
My colleagues in the cultural sector don’t have any money to support us; times are tough.
I have new colleagues here on Substack who might but I feel awkward about asking them.
I could email my list of people who buy things from me (which is now 625 people) but I’m scared of them unsubscribing or being confused.
The funding we do have will support my husband to deliver at least x2 schools sessions.
I’ve done at least 10 social media posts, a personalised email, a post or two here. I’ve run out of steam to do more on it and I also WANT to focus on other things. I’ve noticed that only one person I’ve supported has supported us. I guess I kind of hoped that all those people I’d supporting in their campaigns over the years would support me when I finally got round to doing one. But people are busy and maybe I just need to ask again?
I gave us 2.5 months to make the goal… I had no idea how it would go… literally none and there’s a cost of living crisis and it’s been Christmas.
January is probably a really hard time to ask people. Is that a self limiting belief?
I’m wondering if I’ve failed before it’s finished… pragmatically, I wrote a budget and plugged it into a crowd funding campaign, I made space, Dave made video, we wrote to our supporters, I read lots of posts from on crowd funding… perhaps I’m missing something - probably a fair few things? I’ll go easy on us it’s our first time!
That’s it, that’s what I’ve got for you and here’s why I’m there…
Project Bloom 2023…
As we can see if we’re in the Northern Hemisphere, nothing in nature blooms all year round.
There needs to be fallow time.
For root strengthening, for taking stock, for pausing. That’s where I am.
You might see productivity but how I feel is quite still and before that I felt quite tired and before that I worried I might burn out. Sometimes when my three year old, little Luna calls for me for the third time in the dark hours I worry in the middle of the hallway, my flesh will fall away from my bones and I’ll disintegrate.
I wrote about it for
’s Liminal Spaces challenge.You can read it here.