Once upon a time ... well, sometimes it seems like a fairy tale story because it began so long ago.

So, once upon a time, there lived an artist in a beautiful mountain village. The scenery was beautiful and amazing, and you would have thought she should be happy. But she wasn't.

Yes, she knew she was an artist and creative - but that was about all. And even that didn't seem to be of much use. After all, here she was at age thirty, stuck in a dead-end job that had no potential to it. She had no work or career-related training worth talking about. Her personal life felt empty - no boyfriend, no close friends that she could confide in. And the one person she had thought she could trust seemed totally oblivious to what she was going through, in spite of efforts to talk about it. This was the worst of the by now third or fourth major depression in her life.

It was definitely one very not-pretty picture.

That summer as she contemplated her life, there was a deep anger that after all her efforts to live a good life, that she should end up being so deeply miserable and unhappy. If there was one thing she became sure of, it was that this was not the way life was meant to be lived.

One night, sitting alone in her basement apartment, she made a desperate decision. "Come hell or high water, I will not live like this anymore. Somehow, someway, I will find a way to live differently, or I will die trying. But I will not live like this anymore!"

And that began a journey that brought changes that she could never have even imagined.

Two books played a major role in her life that summer. One was called "Failure, the Back Door to Success" - which helped her realize that failure did not need to be the end of things, but it could be the beginning of something far better. (That has turned out to be very true in her life.)

The second book was called "What Color is Your Parachute?". In going through this book, she discovered that she did in fact have some very good things going for her. And it was also going through this book that first birthed the idea of a place where arts and business would take place.

Armed only with that hope and dream, she began the journey toward it. In those first years it was very difficult going because she had so little idea of where to begin or what to do. But she simply took every opportunity life gave her to move toward the dream, however small and uncertain those steps seemed at times.