There is something different about May. Not the careful, cautious energy of early spring, when everything is still testing the air. Not the steady, intentional tending of April. May has a different quality altogether. It is joyful. Expansive. It carries the feeling of a door swinging fully open after being cracked for months.
I think of May as the true beginning of summer. In older traditions, Beltane marks this threshold, a celebration of warmth returning, of life in full expression, of possibility no longer waiting at the edges but arriving right at the center. There’s a reason people danced around the Maypole. This season asks to be met with openness and joy.
This year, I find myself stepping into May with that same spirit. Not because everything is figured out. But because I have been practicing something harder than productivity or strategy. I have been practicing openness.
The Shroud We Carry
There is an unwritten rule in creative and professional work that says: don’t talk about it until it’s done. Don’t share until it’s ready. Don’t let anyone see the project until it has come to fruition, until you have something polished and certain to show for it.
I have lived by that rule for a long time. There is a kind of protection in it. If no one knows what you’re working toward, no one can watch you fall short. But there is also a cost. Secrecy can become a shroud. It keeps out the cold, yes, but it also keeps out the light.
This spring, I started loosening that habit. Sharing more of what I’m working on, even when it’s still unfinished. Talking about possibilities before they are certainties. And something unexpected happened: the openness itself became generative. When you let people see what you’re reaching toward, they reach back.
What Possibility Looks Like When You Let It In
By allowing myself to be open to new things, my business has expanded in ways I genuinely did not imagine when I started. One of the most meaningful directions has been working with fierce women who own their own businesses, many of them in male-dominated industries.
These are women who have built something real in spaces that were not designed with them in mind. They have had to fight for credibility, for visibility, for the simple right to be taken seriously. And their stories are extraordinary. Not because they are dramatic, though sometimes they are, but because they are true. Because they required courage to live, and they require courage to tell.
I did not plan to find my way to this work. It found me because I stayed open. Because I said yes to conversations I wasn’t sure would lead anywhere. Because I trusted that not every seed I planted would bloom, and that was part of the process too. It isn’t failure so much as it is redirection.
The Stories That Don’t Pan Out
Here is something I want to say plainly, because I think it matters: not everything comes to fruition. Some projects dissolve before they begin. Some conversations that felt electric go quiet. Some ideas that seemed ready turn out to need more time, or a different shape, or to belong to someone else entirely.
That is not wasted. It is part of how stories grow. The attempts that didn’t land taught me what I care about. The conversations that faded helped me understand who I’m really meant to serve. The projects that never quite materialized left behind something useful anyway, a question, a direction, a clearer sense of what I’m reaching toward.
Openness means accepting this. It means releasing the need for every seed to produce a harvest on your timeline. It means trusting that the blooming is real even when it doesn’t look the way you expected.
Your Story Deserves to Be Seen
May is asking something of you. You don’t have to have it all together. Don’t wait until the story is complete before you let anyone near it. Just to open a little more than you have been.
Share the work in progress. Talk about what you’re building before it’s built. Let the people around you know what you’re reaching toward, because visibility isn’t vanity. It’s connection. And connection is how stories find the people they were always meant for.
This is your blooming season. You have tended carefully. You have been patient through the cold months and intentional through the thaw. Now the light is long and warm and generous, and it is asking you to rise to meet it.
Let your story fully open. It has been ready longer than you think.
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