Emergence: Living Lessons from the Soil

Life offers us endless teachers. Some are meant to plant seeds of opportunities while others are called to till the soil in preparation for sowing. Many create conditions for growth and a select few we trust to prune our paths. You’ll have people who nourish and others who support in the harvesting. Everything in life is for a season and with a reason.

At a young age, Stephanie Feger would trek to her grandparents’ farm on the weekends. There she learned the value of sweat equity and earned her keep while her family lived off and learned from the land. Regularly, in between those weekend get-aways, she’d spend time with her other grandma who had more plants than she had space in her humble apartment, offering Stephanie insights on how to invite the outside in.

Since her childhood, Stephanie has found that one of life’s greatest teachers, for her, is the soil. With dirt deep in her nail beds, she turns to her vegetable garden, her house plants and the farm in which she lives to offer her ongoing lessons for living and cultivating a fulfilling life.

Emergence: Living Lessons from the Soil is a captivating and thought-provoking memoir filled with profound wisdom on how to nurture a beautiful garden while also cultivating a deeper connection to ourselves, others and the world around us. Through engaging anecdotes, vulnerable vignettes and personal reflections, Stephanie unearths the living lessons found from seed to fruit, including the importance of nourishment, the power of patience, the strength of resilience and the interconnectedness of all living things. There is beauty in the mess, power in the mundane and meaning in the drought.

Whether you are an experienced gardener or a novice… whether you have a green thumb or can’t keep a single plant flourishing under your watch… Emergence: Living Lessons from the Soil offers a wealth of inspiration and guidance for anyone looking to cultivate a more meaningful and fulfilling life.

Stephanie Feger is living proof that any city girl can become a farmer if she desires to. She happily trades nail polish for soil in her nail beds thanks to the love for the outdoors planted within her as a little girl. She feels most at peace when the fall season invites the pesky ticks into their hibernating slumber and she can hike to the bubbling creek in the deepest part of her family's farm to wade in the water. It's an author's paradise, flooding her thoughts with inspiration. Her family of five has grown by leaps and bounds since moving to their twenty-five-acre farm in Kentucky. Redbird Farm, as they call it, is a safe haven to more than just Stephanie; her husband, Cory; and their three kiddos-Eli, Lyndi and Luke. They've accumulated a zoo of permanent residents-six cats: Baby, Timmy, Oreo, Snickers, Tom and Luna-and the sweetest dog on the planet, Zoey. In addition, each year they foster nearly a dozen helpless kittens found throughout Kentucky in need of loving homes. Want Stephanie to go down a rabbit trail of stories? Ask her about her foster favorites. (Hint: They all are!)Stephanie is a book marketing whiz who supports authors in promoting marketable books and building budding businesses from empowering messages. As the owner of the emPower PR Group, a boutique marketing solution for nonfiction authors, she sees the seeds of possibilities within many and offers the conditions to help them bloom into beautiful, pollinating and life-giving messages destined to change lives. Her greatest joy is watching her kids grow into the people God called them to be. Seeing their potential bloom is living proof that sometimes you are the seed, and other times you are the flower, but all the time you can reap the benefits of what you or others sow. When she isn't helping her clients, enjoying the cathartic release of writing herself or cutting grass at turbo speeds on the riding lawn mower, Stephanie enjoys hiking in the mountains of the Red River Gorge, attempting to grow veggie starters even though she knows she will likely not succeed at hardening them, perusing the local hardware store to snatch up a weary house plant to nurse, going to the movies with her family and eating a whole bag of popcorn herself, and spending time reflecting on God's beauty in her every day.Learn more at StephanieFeger.com.