La Semilla Travel - The Seed Was Always There

 

 

A reintroduction — and a coming home

I've been sitting with this since returning from Bali.

Not because I didn't know what to say. But because I wanted to say it right.

There's something that happens when you go back to stillness after a trip like this. The noise settles. And what's left is the thing that was always true — you just couldn't see it through everything else you were carrying.

So let me start over. Or maybe — let me start honestly, for the first time.

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My name is Mary Plousha. I'm the founder of La Semilla Travel

I started this company in April 2024. And when people asked me why, I had an answer ready. Something about transformative travel. Something about women in transition. Something about the seed — la semilla — and the lotus (my logo) rising from murky water.

All of it true.

None of it the whole story.

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The whole story starts in Vietnam. In 1973. With a family that had nothing but each other and the courage to leave everything they knew behind during the Vietnam War — not to escape, but to survive. My father made a decision that changed the trajectory of every life that came after his. He brought us back. To Ventura. To a country that didn't speak our language and didn't look like us and didn't owe us anything.

And somehow — he handed us the world.

I didn't fully understand that until I came back from Bali.

I've known my story my whole life. But sitting in the stillness after this trip, something landed differently. I kept turning it over — why did I start La Semilla? What is this really for? Where did the courage to begin something new in my 50s actually come from?

And then I saw it.

I am creating the opportunities for other women from the journey my parents were never able to achieve themselves.

My mother wasn't allowed to go to school past elementary. In Vietnam, women were treated as second-class citizens. She worked to support a family whose father had been imprisoned. She raised four children in a country she arrived in without speaking a single word of the language. She ingrained in us a work ethic, a kindness, a deep and bone-level gratitude — not as inspiration, but as survival.

And on this trip — being back in Bali, sitting in the stillness — I found myself thinking about where she came from. Not just the war. Not just the sacrifice. But the roots underneath all of it.

My mother's family carried a deep and beautiful Buddhist faith. My great-grandfather — her grandfather — served as a monk twice in his lifetime.

Twice.

I sat with that. A man who gave himself to something greater than himself, not once, but twice. A man whose spiritual devotion ran so deep it shaped the woman who shaped me. And here I am, building a company rooted in transformation and soul and the belief that every woman carries within her the potential to bloom — using a lotus as my symbol. The lotus. A Buddhist symbol. Growing from murky water into something beautiful.

I didn't plan that.

Or maybe — it was always planned. Just not by me.

She never got to travel the world. She never got to take a trip just for herself. She never got to sit with a medicine woman in Bali and ask herself who she was becoming.

But she gave me the courage to do all of it — before I even knew I had it. And her father's faith lives in the very logo I chose without fully understanding why.

My mother created La Semilla Travel long before I ever knew it.

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I won't pretend the journey here has been easy or clear.

There were years where I didn't recognize the woman in the mirror. Years where I put everyone before myself — and called it love, when really, some of it was fear. Fear that if I stopped carrying everything, it would all fall apart. Fear that wanting something for myself made me selfish. I was failing as a wife and mother at times, not because I was giving too much — but because I had stopped giving anything to myself. And you can't pour from a place that's been empty for that long.

I didn't know how to name that then.

I'm naming it now.

Because I know I'm not the only one who has felt it.

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I'm in my 2.0 era

Kids grown. Husband retired. Post-pandemic. Standing in the middle of what I used to think was supposed to feel like arrival — and realizing it feels more like a beginning.

Who do I want to be in this next chapter? What does this version of my life actually look like? What have I been holding back that's finally ready to bloom?

These aren't questions I'm asking rhetorically. I'm asking them on every trip I take. I'm asking them on behalf of every woman who boards a plane with me.

And I'm asking them for my mother, who never got the chance.

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Here's where we're going next

In April 2027, I'm leading a group back to Vietnam. April 5th through the 18th.

This one is personal.

I went back for my 50th birthday — as a gift to myself, with my friend Kristen, my sister, and a mother who surprised me by joining. We prayed at our ancestors' graves. We rode motorcycles through rice fields. We stood in front of the war-torn home my mother fled as a girl. We found the hospital site where I was born — now gone. I felt the pull of a place we hadn't been in 47 years.

It felt like a coming home.

This trip will carry that same energy — but wider. For women who want to understand a culture that has survived everything, and a people who meet each day with grace and resilience that will rearrange something in you. We'll explore the roots, the history, the food, the family — the country I wasn't able to see as a child. The country that made me. The Buddhist temples. The ancestors. The stories passed down through women who weren't always allowed to tell them out loud.

And then in late April 2027, we go to Bali.

Same format you know — small group, intimate, soul-forward. Shaman readings. Time with the medicine women. The water blessing ceremony that doesn't just touch you — it reaches the places in you that have been waiting to be seen. I'm still working out the final details and dates, but it's coming. And it will be worth the wait.

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If you've been following La Semilla for a while — thank you for being here.

If you're new here and you found this at 2am, scrolling and searching for something you can't quite name —

Welcome. You're my people.

I'm not here to sell you a vacation. I'm here because my mother worked her whole life so I could have a shot at this. And I'm not about to take that for granted.

If what I'm describing is calling to you — the Vietnam journey, the Bali retreat, or just the idea that the next chapter of your life could look like something you actually designed —

Come find me. The seed is already in you.

It was always there.

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La Semilla Travel — Where the seed of your soul discovers your true self, one journey at a time.

[Link to Vietnam Trip] [Link to Bali 2027 Interest List] [Link to All Group Trips]