Hello my loves,

Today we’re examining a real-life case study of how trusting your path, and listening to the quiet whisper within, leads to unimaginable rewards. For demonstration purposes, we’re going to use the last six months of my life, which frankly, have been quite the ride. Let’s break it down:

Nov 2019: After building her temple of deliciousness/restaurant, and running it for a year, Rachel gets an undeniably strong feeling that it’s time to close the doors. This feeling is not entirely welcome - she’s worked bloody hard to get to where she is, she loves running her restaurant, and to be honest, she’s a bit confused about why she’d be receiving such a strong message to wrap it all up. After much soul searching, she decides to trust her heart, and closes the doors of Hearth & Soul.
Dec 2019: Rachel makes every effort to trust in her path, even though the way forward isn't clear. She knows she's made the right decision, but some days this isn't as easy to remember as she'd like it to be. Also, she sleeps a lot. Turns out 2019 had made her very tired.
Dec 31, 2019: Rachel quite literally stands in a fire on New Year's Eve, watching the world around her turning inferno-red, and genuinely wondering for about 45 minutes whether the path she was trusting in had in fact led to a rather fiery end. Thankfully, it had not.
Jan-Feb 2019: Rachel finds renewed strength. New pieces of the puzzle start to drop into place, and exciting plans for new offerings are now in the works.
March 2019: Enter Covid. All exciting plans go on hold. BUT WAIT - THERE'S MORE. Rachel realises that she and her peacefully slumbering restaurant premises are exactly perfectly placed to re-open to provide nourishment to the community in a time of need. Her premises is rested and ready to go. She is rested and ready to go. She sends an email and a gloriously beautiful community of support mushrooms up around her. It was almost like this was the point all along 😱.
May 2019: Things look like they're easing. Restaurants are allowed to re-open, for ten people only. Ten people only. Isn't that the most perfectly gorgeous, intimate, beautiful, personal, perfect number of guests for Rachel to create glorious bespoke dinners for - dinners that feed both her and her guests in all the right ways. She wakes up every morning still not quite believing that closing her restaurant six months ago has in fact led to her re-opening it, to serve nourishment in even deeper and more meaningful ways.

To summarise, here's what I've learned in the last six months. I knew and believed this stuff anyway, but it appears that the universe has been using that last six months to prove to me beyond a shadow of a doubt that:

Everything happens for a reason, so don't fight it. If I hadn't experienced the fires, I wouldn't been the recipient of the sausage-and-bread relief that rolled in afterwards (thankyou Salvation Army and Red Cross), and it probably never would have occurred to me that providing nourishment to people who'd been suddenly displaced would make a big difference.
Trust in your heart. Always. If I hadn't closed my restaurant in November 2019, I would have been dealing with closing it during Covid, like so many people had to. I would have been frantically trying to look after my staff, deal with regulations that were changing almost daily, and watching everything grind to a halt in an unblievably short space of time. I wouldn't have been rested, and I wouldn't have had the clarity and distance to be able to view the situation from a different perspective, and realise that there was something I could do to help.
Trust in your path, even if you can't see every step right now. And hot damn, maybe you don't even want to see those steps! Maybe your path is so freaking fantastic that you couldn't currently conceive how glorious it's going to be. If someone had handed me a piece of paper in November and asked me to design my perfect 2020, there's no way I could have ever conceptualised what it actually has looked like, or just how incredibly amazing this experience has been for me. I literally could not have created this because I would never have even been able to conceptualise it. I guess that's why they're angels :).
Anything is possible, so don't limit your dreams. Imagine if someone had tried to tell you in Nov 2019: "Gee it's going to be big next year when the whole globe shuts down for a few months and they close all the borders and there's no more travel anywhere for anyone and no-one leaves their homes for weeks!". ***Cue the sound of sirens and footsteps of men in white coats approaching***. I'm not saying Covid is a dream come true, but I am saying that it's a pretty clear proof point that things that were very recently thought completely impossible were absolutely not impossible, and the change happened FAST. My view is that the universe is showing each and every one of us that reality can shift at any time. If you have a dream, even if it seems like it's impossible or you can't quite see how the world as it is right now will support it, know this my darling: anything can happen. So go for it!!!! Just take the steps that feel right to you right now, and let the universe sort out the details. That's what they're there for :).

So my loves, on we go. I'm so filled with joy to be cooking for you all again, and I'm so incredibly grateful to be where I am right now. I'll be holding my intimate dinners as and when they feel right to me, for as long as my circumstances allow - I only have a limited amount of time left on the lease for Hearth, so I'm surrendering to the universe as to what the next few months should look like for me (it's always advisable to take your own advice 😂). Our first two dinners are both sold out (!), but I'll be releasing new dates when the time feels right, and you will absolutely be the first to know. And with that, I will leave you for the week, sending you all my love and best wishes for a delicious weekend. I'll be making the most of this gloriously cool autumn weather with an intensive snugging schedule (woolly socks on, duvet up, snug down deeeeeeep). Until next week my loves 🍁.

Love, Rachel xxx