The story behind the hummingbird, my mother, and the method I built.
My mother died in January of 2023. She was 75, and by every measure anyone could find, perfectly healthy. Then a rare and aggressive cancer took her inside a single year. Start to finish, 12 months. I still have not made peace with how fast it moved.
She loved hummingbirds. Not casually, the way you might love a nice view. She loved them the way some people love a piece of music, completely and without explanation.
And after a lifetime of swearing she was not a tattoo person, she had decided that one image meant enough to put on her body forever. A hummingbird. On her ankle. Delicate, watercolor, the colors bleeding soft into her skin.
She spent months on the choice. The style, the placement, the exact wash of color. It took her whole life to find one image that meant that much to her, and she died before she ever sat in the chair.
The thought still breaks my heart.
I am not a tattoo person either. I always assumed I would never get a tattoo because the desire never came. So when I started this business and sat down to build a brand, there was no real decision to make. Of course it would be a hummingbird. For her. To remember her. When I sketched that first logo, the bird was in motion, flitting, searching, and gravitating toward the joy.
That was the whole idea before I had language for the brand. The hummingbird that moves toward joy.
I chose this bird out of love and grief. Only later did I learn I had chosen the most precise symbol my work could possibly carry.
A body built for rest and for flight
The hummingbird runs the fastest metabolism of any warm-blooded animal alive. At rest in the cold of night it drops into torpor, its heart slowing to around 50 beats a minute. In flight that same heart climbs past 1,000. Hovering, it burns roughly 10 times more energy per ounce than a human at a dead sprint.
Full output when the moment demands power, deep rest the rest of the time, and nothing white-knuckled in the middle.
That is the whole premise of my method, written into a living creature. Not force. Responsiveness. A body that gives exactly what the moment asks, precisely when the moment asks.
The hard work no one sees
We picture the hummingbird sipping nectar, floating through a sunny life on sugar water. It cannot survive that way. Close to 80% of its diet is insects and spiders. A nesting female hunts and eats as many as 2,000 of them in a single day.
When the first zoos tried to keep hummingbirds alive on sugar water alone, the birds died. Every time. Only when the keepers added protein did the birds live. Some biologists now call the hummingbird an insect eater that happens to drink nectar on the side.
So the elegant little creature we assume runs on sweetness is actually one of the most relentless feeders in nature. The beauty is real. The ease is not. Underneath the grace sits enormous, invisible, deeply unglamorous work.
I think about that constantly, and it is the truest thing I know about the women I mentor. The world sees the composed surface and assumes it came without cost. It never does. What looks effortless is quietly, ferociously well fed.
A spirit that comes back
Long before I chose her, the hummingbird carried meaning across the Americas.
To the Aztecs she was sacred. Their sun and war god, Huitzilopochtli, wore a name built from 2 Nahuatl words: hummingbird, and south. Warriors who fell in battle were believed to return to earth as hummingbirds, small and brilliant and fierce, rising each morning to carry the sun into the sky.
Weighing less than a nickel, the bird is genuinely fearless, diving at hawks and outflying birds many times its size. The people read all of that as a warrior spirit, proof that something small and beautiful can also be formidable, and that a beloved life can come back in radiant form.
For a brand born out of my mother, I did not need anyone to explain that layer. The one who is gone returns as the hummingbird.
A messenger of joy
The joy was never an accident of the name.
Across the Maya world, the sun itself was said to take the shape of a hummingbird to court the moon. Across many Indigenous North American traditions, the bird arrives as a sign of delight, healing, and the reminder to taste the sweetness of the life in front of you.
Cultures separated by thousands of miles landed on the same small bird to mean the same enormous thing. Joy, lightness, and the nerve to move toward what is good.
What the hummingbird holds
I chose this bird for my mother. I did not choose her as a metaphor. She became one anyway.
One small body holds 4 truths. A creature built for both rest and full power. A beauty fed by hard and hidden work. A spirit that refuses to be fragile and comes back radiant. A messenger that moves, always, toward joy.
That is the method. That is the woman I built this to serve. And that is my mother, in the one form she chose and never got to wear.
Every time you see the hummingbird on my work, that is what it holds. Her memory. My promise. And an invitation, to you, to follow the joy.