Making a living from love

Anyone who’s spent any amount of time with me since the remarkable weekend I spent at Misfit Con has heard me go on and on about the conference. I still can’t stop talking about it. And it’s not just coming out my mouth. Nope. The greatest thing is how that experience is continuing to express itself in every single thing I do now. It’s true:

I am forever changed.

The biggest thing is that I think I am actually doing something I wrote about at least a year ago, when I wondered in a Facebook status, “could I make a living out of enthusiasm?”

Thanks to that long weekend in Fargo, North Dakota with a hundred or so new friends and co-conspirators, I’m taking it a step further.

I’m making a living from love.

Listen. Here’s all you really need to know about Misfit Con: we all applied, were accepted and paid our $475 fee for a two-day conference, some of us almost a year in advance, on trust alone. We know what Misfit means – we’ve grown accustomed to this level of fine attention to detail, of beauty, of quality – so none of us thought twice about meeting up in North Dakota without a single idea of what the agenda was, who would be speaking. We didn’t know what would happen, but we expected to be delighted.

And really? When’s the last time you went to a conference and, instead of renting 140 same-same plastic chairs for the event, the organizers went out and collected 140 individual, one-of-one chairs (with their own Insta, btw, @misfitchairs), and placed them in an art gallery that they had specially decorated with boughs of local trees, to bring the outdoors in (and where there was also a painter stationed in the corner, live-painting the event)? When’s the last time you went to a conference and instead of a commemorative mug or whatever, the organizers commissioned a local potter to make 140 absolutely lovely, no-two-alike handcrafted cups?

Uh yeah, NEVER. Unless you went to Misfit Con.

I could go on and on, about the handmade nametags, the coffee and the breakfasts, and the snacks and lunches, and the piles of free books and art and the outpouring of generosity from our hosting community (#ilovefargo), the free yoga, the charm of the town and its inhabitants. Really I could keep going.

The days unfolded, one sparkling, mind-blowing surprise after another, like fireworks lifting our eyes, all of us, one voice, exhaling, “woooooow.”

Speakers, yes, of course, and also delight: a genius poet, a young violin prodigy, flash Shakespeare, an opera singer, films, a yoyo champion, a folk singer. And there was more. So much more.

But the story I keep telling, the one that lets me tell the rest, is the story of the marshmallow maker. Nathan Clark blew me away on Day 1 (after I’d been blown away already about 5 times by everything that had happened that morning so far, starting at free 7am yoga), and he was only, according to my notes, Speaker #2 on Day #1. He completely charmed me with his story of a company that started only because he is so in love with his wife. In search of a gift to delight her, he settled on making candy together, marshmallows specifically.

From that first experience of crafting delicious real marshmallows together – really, from love -- Wondermade was born. He talked about the year they spent on product development and package design. He told us about turning down a 6-figure deal that sure, would have grown their earnings but would have cheapened the ingredients and the packaging, two elements they weren’t willing to bargain with.

But mostly he talked about Love. About Wondermade marshmallows being a gift of love. And then he said these words, and I wrote them down and they haven’t stopped resonating for me yet. It’s like they’re in me now, like a miraculous tiny strawberry marshmallow melting in my mouth.

Don’t give what you get. Give everything you’ve got.

and

Give people their love’s worth, not just their money’s worth.

and

People love us because we love them first.

Damn.

That’s really what I brought back with me: this sense that what I do, what I make, what I give, needs to be of love. It’s the next and practical step following from the big epiphany I had in October, courtesy Michael Franti – when I realized how much love was missing from my day-to-day employment, when I knew, in my bones, deep, instantly, that I had to make a break with the life I was living. In order to live the life I craved, a life of love.

In the time since my return from the magical land of Fargo, so much has happened, and all of it, ALL OF IT, has been informed by that profound, joyful experience, by this new sense of mission, really, that I’m here to give everything I have – what I know, what I make, what I do – really all and only in service of L-O-V-E.

That might seem incongruous if I’m telling you about some of my paid bookkeeping work, but I assure you it’s not – because what’s at the core of that bookkeeping work, is an abiding desire to ensure the success of the people I’m working with, and surely that’s a gift of love. It’s a desire to contribute to their stability and happiness, and what could be more loving than that?

And with the beekeeping and the making that derives from it, well, that’s pure love. Sure, there’re stings sometimes, but oh, the pleasure of the bee-ing is so much greater than that. And that now there’s an opportunity to expand this, to grow my little blissbug into something more, its own website, some pop-up retail, possibly lessons, possibly a book, well, there is nothing better than that.

Since Fargo, my days are all about bookkeeping & beekeeping. I turn this over and over in my mind, until it hits me: it's all blisskeeping, really.

As a way to share the magic, sprinkle the Misfit Con fairydust on others, Wondermade marshmallows are now my go-to hostess gift, that thing I bring with me to say Thank You, I Love You. They’re so special and pretty and tasty. They’re just right.

As I hand them over, I get to maybe tell the story again, about the Misfits and the marshmallow man and all the wonder of that weekend, and how we can, we must, live the lives we crave, make them with our own two hands, with love.

XX