Dear Reader,

Whether it's delivering keynotes, making a perfect French omelette, or staging furniture in a room — you can be really, really good at things that don't bring you more fully alive.

And that's a funny thing about being a woman in midlife, you get good at something, and then the getting-good becomes a trap.

When that happens, as Mark Nepo puts it, "we're asked to shed our gown of mastery in order to begin again."

Staying alive in your own life means you can't keep hiding behind the thing you're good at. You have to walk out past what you know, empty-handed, trusting the foggy path ahead.

I know this shedding well, because I've lived it. My first careers as an art teacher and then scholar weren't wrong, they just weren't quite it.

I was really good at both — but they were only "good enough" placeholders for what matters most to me: imagination, the slow dreaming of a better world, beauty, co-creation.

"Good enough" eventually cracks, because what's inside it keeps growing.

Those first-half-of-life jobs were the pot and trellis. My calling as a soul coach, the wild vine that split it clean up the middle.

Maybe other girls grew up dreaming of their soul vocation, but not me. I wanted to be a marine biologist or pediatrician.

But evidence to the contrary was piling up in a shoebox under my bed.

Rocks and feathers galore. The hours I spent alone in my own imaginal world. The crayons I melted on a hot plate and used as pigment, painted across any flattened cereal box I could find.

The way I loved brushing my great-grandmother's fine white hair, listening to her without speaking a word.

Classic wild-vine behavior!

To our second bite,

Brooke

P.S. On Sunday, I'll drop a journaling question to help you feel into your own wild vine.

DEPARTMENT OF BEAUTY & MAGIC

I'm Brooke Hofsess.

I'm a Midlife Midwife for women who want to start their next chapter from soul, not fear or ego, so they can finally do the work they're meant to do — and actually enjoy it.

You'll find me in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, where I live with my husband Dustin, our daughter Thea, two clever border collies, and an ever-growing collection of handmade mugs for Egyptian Licorice Mint tea.

You can read about my journey here.​