Living the Fire, Living the Dream

There are days when the dream feels so close I could almost hold it. It lingers just beyond my grasp, pulsing like a truth already alive, waiting for me to step into it fully. That closeness is both humbling and electrifying. It reminds me that this journey isn’t only about distance or time, it’s about courage. About the willingness to keep moving forward when the ground is anything but steady.

Lately, the world feels unbearably heavy. The country feels torn in every direction, full of division, distrust, and noise. Conversations echo with anger, headlines with fear. And yet, when I zoom in to the micro, my own daily steps, the next decision, the work of building something rooted in healing, I see the same patterns mirrored inside. Old fears rising. Old wounds resurfacing. The shadow work unfolding whether I wanted it to or not.

To build a business like this, now, feels like walking across a whitewater river on stones that barely float. Each step shifts beneath me, slick and unstable. The current pulls strong, threatening to carry me away if I hesitate. My body tightens with the weight of it, heart pounding, eyes fixed on just the next stone. I cannot see the end of the crossing, only what is right in front of me. And still I move, because stopping here is not safety, it’s surrender. The only way across is forward.

And forward right now looks like this: I have one month. Thirty days to pull it all together. By October 15th, everything must be in place, the funding, the permits, the approvals, all of it. And layered beneath that, I have two weeks. Fifteen days until a new cycle begins. My birthday. My 40th, no less. The universe feels as though it has thrown me into the belly of the beast, right into the fire, demanding that I face every fear, every wound, every old story that would try to stop me. And I’ll be honest…I am boiling over. I can feel it. But maybe that’s the point. Maybe this fire is the purification, the release, the very thing that will shape me into the woman who can carry this vision across the river.

Because fire is not just destruction, it is alchemy. It is the archetype of the Phoenix rising from ashes, of the Trailblazer who burns a new path, of the Dreamer who dares to imagine what doesn’t exist yet. And right now, I see myself in all three. I am burning through what no longer serves me. I am breaking a path across waters no one has crossed in this way before. And I am holding a dream so bold that it keeps me moving even when the weight of the world says I should stop.

This is why I know I am qualified to teach these archetypes. Not because I studied them from afar, but because I am living them in real time. They are not abstract, they are alive in me, shaping me, breaking me open, and remaking me stronger. I am not asking anyone to walk where I haven’t walked. I am offering the very path I am on.

This is the part of the spiral they don’t tell you about. The part where faith and exhaustion meet, where vision and fear blur together, where you are asked to step past your own limits and discover strength you didn’t know existed. Each layer of the spiral demands more, more surrender, more trust, more resilience. And every new stone I step on feels like the breaking point, only to reveal that I can, in fact, go further.

Exactly one month ago, the nautilus revealed itself to me in a piece of art I had looked at for years but had never truly seen. Since then, spirals have followed me everywhere, from a snail shell on my step, to the curl of a fern, to the whorl of the night sky. The macro and micro meet here too: the galaxies overhead, the shell beneath my feet, each carrying the same pattern. The spiral tells me that the breaking point is not the end but the beginning of a new chamber. That stretching thin can sometimes mean expanding wide.

And on Saturday, just when I needed reminding, the nautilus appeared again. Other signs have shown themselves too, ones I’ll keep close to my own heart. They arrive like quiet magic, affirming what words cannot. They remind me that even in the heaviness of the macro and the stretching thin of the micro, something larger is unfolding.

I think that’s why, even as a little girl, I was captivated by rainbows, unicorns, and leprechauns. Deep in my bones I believed in magic, even if I didn’t know how to put it into words. I was drawn to anything that gave me a glimpse of that shimmer, that sense that the world held more than what met the eye. Rainbows became my symbol. I would stand after storms staring at the sky, convinced that if I could just find the end, a treasure waited for me there.

And rainbows weren’t just mine. They were always my grandmother’s way of saying hi to us, the same grandmother on my mother’s line whose intuitive gifts have run up the female line for generations, and the same grandmother whose presence I’ve been reflecting on in my ancestral and lineage work. Looking back, it makes sense that rainbows carried so much weight for me. They weren’t only beauty in the sky, they were a message, a bridge, a reminder that magic runs in my blood.

And this weekend, life gave me the answer I didn’t know I had been waiting for. After spending the day at the Big E, the sky broke open on the drive home. Rain poured, and then before my eyes stretched a full, blazing rainbow. For the first time in my life, I wasn’t chasing it, I was placed at its very end. My boyfriend even snapped a photo of us driving through it. I couldn’t believe it, I kept repeating myself aloud, almost laughing at the wonder of it, unable to take in what was happening. And then it struck me: we are the gold. There I was, at the end of the rainbow, not alone but with the man I love and his son who has found such a solid place in my heart. After a day full of laughter and love in a world that feels like it is crumbling around us, I understood: the treasure was here all along.

If you’ve ever found yourself at the end of a rainbow, perhaps you felt it too, that sense that the true gift is not what you discover out there, but who you already are. Perhaps this is what the rainbow warriors have always been whispering through time: that the treasure we seek is ourselves, and together, we are the gold.

The dream is close. I feel it in the trembling stones beneath me, in the widening spiral surrounding me, in the rainbow that crowned the storm. And if you are reading this, perhaps your dream is close too. The world may feel impossibly heavy, but the spiral is still carrying us. The river is still moving us forward. The signs are still appearing, if we are willing to see them.

And so I will keep going. I will keep becoming. I will allow myself to be even more vulnerable, and I will put all my cards on the table. Because holding back now would mean turning away from the very dream that has carried me this far, and I am not turning back.

With faith in the mystery,

Kelley