Around Christmas time last year, Lenny brought an orchid home for me. It was beautiful. For the horticulturally-challenged, such as myself, I have to say this was the easiest plant I had ever taken care of. Give it three ice cubes once per week and it lives.
Notice I didn’t say it flourishes. It maintained its gorgeous purple flowers for over a month and then the petals fell off. Before I knew it, I had two bare stems and some hearty leaves sticking out of a pot. It was pretty ugly. Lenny was convinced I had murdered another plant. He kept telling me to throw it away. But I couldn’t. As hideous as it was, I had nurtured it and I was not about to give up on it. So, I kept icing it once per week.
A little over a month ago and all of a sudden, little acorn-sized buds started appearing again. Then they got bigger. Take a look at my orchid now…
I don’t understand my orchid’s growth pattern. But I found myself thinking about my orchid today as I reflected back on this week and this series. I started off describing my creativity as some annoying animal that could grow into something fierce. Perhaps. However, as I’ve moved through this week, I’m leaning more toward my orchid versus some animal. It’s alive and vibrant; then it loses its luster for a while.
I wanted to give up on myself earlier this week. After long days, lots of work, and oodles of thoughts tumbling through my mind, the last thing I wanted to do was turn it on again and try to create something late every night. However, giving up would have been failure for me. No matter how ridiculous my ideas or posts were, I couldn’t give up. I knew I could produce something worthwhile. Here’s what I got out of this week:
- It takes time to create. Give yourself room to think, something to look at, tools to express your ideas and something valuable will come of it. It may not be exactly what you set out to accomplish, but that’s the beauty of letting the process work.
- It is a process. In its simplest form, LAMSTAIH. Look-At-More-Stuff, Think-About-It-Harder. To take it further, you can look at stuff and think all day long, but if you don’t get thoughts and ideas out of your head, your brain will swallow them back up.
- Never reject the wacky factor. My favorite part of this past week was spending time with my tree. The whole time I was doing that, I was thinking to myself, “You’re an idiot. It’s a tree.” Now, that tree has a history for me, it means more to me every time I see it, and through a series of thoughts and exercises, I arrived at some art for my office. Who’d have thought? That certainly wasn’t what I set out to accomplish. (PS...my second favorite part of this week was writing a rap song. That's right, go ahead and laugh. It's way cool.)
- You make the rules so don't quit if you falter. I skipped Day 6 for my own health (thus the reason there is no entry). I felt bad about it for 0.2 seconds. However, at 1:30 in the morning, I wasn’t about to make something up for the sake of having an entry. Today was better for it and I still feel good about this past week.
All in all, I’ve got office art, two new songs (my favorite is called Warrior), a list of projects I can continue to work on, and a sense that this was a good thing for me. Thank you for indulging my week-long journey into the abyss that is my mind. Poodles and lions and orchids, oh my! Let’s wrap this up with a goofy picture. I had to break out the lion at some point.
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