The Story Behind the Courage Collection
The Courage Collection is a set of bracelets made to be worn on the days you need to remember how strong you actually are. I did not design these bracelets, but I chose every one of them and gave each its name, and I did not choose them around a trend. I chose them around a word so many of us have had to live, over and over, across lives that ask more of us than we thought we had to give.
What courage actually costs
Courage is a beautiful word until you have to spend it. Then you learn what it really is. It is the mother holding a household together on her own. The daughter who becomes her parents’ caregiver. The friend who shows up on the worst morning of your life, and keeps showing up. The woman who walks away from a marriage, and the one who stays and fights for hers. The one who gets sober and stays that way, one day at a time, and the one who has not gotten there yet. The one who sets a boundary with someone she loves and grieves the fallout. The one who finally begins the thing she has been putting off for years, while a quieter voice keeps asking who she thinks she is.
Most of us have paid for our courage in more than one of those currencies. I did not choose this collection because I have been brave. I chose it because you have been, and some days you need the reminder. The Courage Collection is something small and solid to hold onto on those days, a piece that says keep going.
The one I wear is the Ofrenda, named for the altar I build every fall for the people I have lost. It reminds me of one, too. The baroque pearls and smoky quartz catch the light the way candlelight bounces off the photographs and the glass and the marigolds on an altar at night. I gave my daughter the Peridot, with its lovely freshwater pearl drop, and she gets compliments on it every time she wears it. That is my favorite kind of courage, the kind you can hand to someone you love.
What is the Courage Collection?
The Courage Collection is twenty-four bracelets, each one named for something in the world of Monarch of the Heart. Some carry the monarch butterfly, for transformation. Some are named for Día de Muertos, or Day of the Dead, and the remembrance at the heart of it, like the Ofrenda, the Papel Picado, and the Marigold Path. Others are named for the quieter moments the story lives in, dusk and golden hour, still water and the horizon. Every name is a small piece of the book you can wear.
They are made from a variety of beautiful materials, including freshwater and baroque pearls, sterling silver, gold vermeil, and stones like turquoise, rose quartz, and tiger’s eye. Some are delicate chains, some are beaded wraps, and a few are simple stretch bracelets you can slip on without thinking. There is one for nearly every wrist and nearly every budget.
Made to mean something
These are not lucky charms, and I would never claim they hold any power of their own. Their meaning is simpler and truer than that. They are reminders. You bring the courage. The piece just helps you remember you already have it.
Which bracelet should you start with?
If you have read the novel, the Monarch Bracelet will feel like an old friend. A butterfly charm on freshwater pearl, it is the piece most closely tied to the story, a wearable thread back to Rylee’s journey and to the transformation at the heart of the book. I think of it as the collection’s anchor. When readers ask me where to start, this is the one I point them to first.
If remembrance is what you are carrying, the Marigold Path is the one I would put in your hand. It is named for the trail of cempasúchil petals that families lay from the street to the altar on Día de Muertos, so that no one they love loses the way home.
For the days you need it most
Wear yours on the hard mornings. The first day of the new job. The anniversary you are dreading. The conversation you have been putting off. Let it sit against your wrist and remind you that you have survived one hundred percent of your hardest days so far. You are braver than you give yourself credit for. This collection is just here to help you remember.
Find the piece that feels like yours, and if you have not met Rylee yet, you can read the first chapter free.
With much love for the journey,
Carrie
