My latest fascination is gardening. Something has clicked this year and instead of a little trial and a lot of error, I’m experiencing a little trial and a lot of success.
Yay. And it only took me…well, never mind how long it took me.
What matters is that my gardens are looking really good and I’m starting to plant in unusual containers again. I always found this frivolity amusing but for some reason I stopped doing it for a while.
Honestly, I often feel torn between writing and gardening. I love doing both. But I can look back and see that when I was writing intensely, my gardening was on the wane. And when I am gardening intensely, my writing is on the wane.
But I don’t want to have to choose. I want to do both.
Recently my husband gave me a broken-down typewriter that someone had donated to his theater department. The Underwood is to junky to use as a prop but, of course there are other possibilities… So broken down typewriter: prepare to become a pot.
When Jason gave me the typewriter, I got the message. Why struggle? Writing and gardening have so much in common. This was the theme of this month’s Become Your Own Writing Coach pep talk and it’s a topic I have addressed before in The Writer’s Workout. I even wrote an article comparing platforms and gardens for Author magazine, Grow For It: Activate & Reactivate Your Perennial Platform Power. It was one of my most comprehensive articles on platform development.
So why do I put my writing and gardening at odds with each other? Why can’t they compliment each other? They could if I let them, since they already do.
All of this was the inspiration for a new digital download poster I created for my Etsy shop. The quote is: “A bouquet is a poem written in flowers.” And the photo is selection of flowers I picked from the garden with my daughter Samantha on Mother’s Day weekend.
If you love words and gardening, you are not alone. If you words and many other things, you are not alone. We are allowed to mix things up, to juxtapose them, to bring unlikely things together. The creative impulse wants to move forward into the new, not have to choose one direction over another. So why not just go with it?
In the past, I have shared lower resolution images of my posters on Pinterest. This time, I am sharing images of the framed poster. The digital download itself is available for purchase in my Etsy shop. It turned out beautifully and I had so much fun making it.
If you like it too, thanks for sharing it with your friends who love words and flowers.
How about you? Do you have things in your life that you put in competition with your writing? Do you need to stop creating friction and start creating something new instead?
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