“My figs cannot rot, for I am the tree.”

I’ve been thinking about you.

If you are reading this, you participated in the now-retired Uprooting Passion series, and I owe you an explanation for my absence. 

First of all, your stories are still alive and well on my newly rebranded site. I confess my site and brand have gone through several lives in the past 3 years, but alas, here we are. 

I want to talk about what this project taught me.

The idea for Uprooting Passion came to life while I was 21 years old and living with my Sicilian grandma in a retirement community. If you’re curious why on earth I decided to move there at such a lively age, feel free to check out my first-ever blog post that was dedicated to that very story. 

Living with my nonna Santa, a name that quite literally means saint, helped me contemplate my life’s journey beyond what I had individually experienced. I was introduced to a way of life, a culture rather, that felt so familiar, yet I knew so little about. 

There were two large fig trees in her garden. These two trees mirror the life, death, and lessons that I was learning all around me. 

This experience helped introduce me to a version of myself that felt so connected to something larger– my family, my culture, my traumas, my passions, and a feeling of unconditional love. 

Using the analogy of roots as a guide, I sought to help others experience themselves in this way. I wanted other people to have the opportunity to contemplate their roots and make connections to where they are today. 

Most of us do know why we are where we are today, or why we have the passions we do. Disclaimer: if you feel like you don’t, you’re not alone in this either. But we also are caught up in the distractions of daily life that we hardly take the time to contemplate the chain reactions of our life. 

To each and every one of you reading this, it was truly an honor for me to witness you all connect with your roots and tell your story in a way that maybe you hadn’t, or hadn’t usually thought about. This strengthened my deep conviction that everyone has a valuable story to share, with no experience being of less value than another.

I made a critical error in this project, and it resulted in me stopping the interviews. While I had initially thought I was pursuing my passion (inspiring others to make connections in a deep and profound way), I started to feel that this wasn’t enough. 

I fell for the fallacy that is sold online that if our passion isn’t our living, we’re doing something wrong. I thought that I needed to make a business out of what I was doing. The good news is that I was really bad at figuring out how to do that, and was never successful in finding ways to grow my initiative. I am truly grateful for that. 

It would have been a shame for me to have attached a tangible value to my passion. I think that the best way to honor not only yourself, but whatever it is you value highest in your life, is through doing whatever it is that makes you feel fully present and at peace with yourself.

Unlike how we would like to think, our passion doesn’t need to be some extravagant thing like the endless, redundant, and fake posts we see online.

The word passion actually derives from the Latin word ‘passio,’ which means ‘to suffer’ or ‘to endure.’ Two things are for sure in our lives, and that is that we will suffer and that we will die. Your passion is anything, anything at all, that keeps you present and distracted from the inevitable. That is our little glimpse of heaven on earth. 

Passion is like a dog chasing after a ball, or children playing tag. Maybe it is simply looking into the eyes of someone you love, or just simply a morning ritual of making coffee. 

You all took a chance on me to tell your story. For that, I am incredibly grateful. You all have a passion, something that keeps you present, that I was drawn to dig into more. I think we all achieved a great win in those moments. 

As an ode to Uprooting Passion, to all of you, and to the very topic that I shared today, I am excited to launch The Fig Letter. I can’t promise to always be the most exciting thing to hit your inbox, but I would be honored to have you along with me on this new journey. 

If you ever want to reconnect, exchange ideas, have a new story you want to share, or simply say hello, I am always here.

With love and gratitude, 

Kayla Rose

Side note: I unfortunately lost all images during the rebrand of the Honestus website. Please feel free to share with me an image that you would like me to add back to your article, and I will do that asap!