Do you plant the same thing in your garden year after year?
In my last garden, each spring when I walked around and envisioned what I wanted to plant that year, I always went through the same process of longing for the familiar. An old fashioned climbing rose, bleeding hearts, or salvia that I had used so successfully in last year’s garden would be the first choices that came to mind.
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| View of Middle Level Garden |
Can you imagine feeling like you’ve created a delightful feast for the eyes with only 4 window boxes?
I can.
I always thought that nothing would replace my love of designing large, sweeping beds. The expansive, long distance views gave me chills at the end of a long day of work in my garden. Or when opening the pages of a beautifully executed gardening magazzine.
But guess what? The yearning for that type of larger than life beauty has been replaced by something else. Gardening ‘in the ‘micro’.
For several years now, I’ve talked and written about how living with ambiguity is an integral part of the creative process. My book, Digging Deep: Unearthing Your Creative Roots Through Gardening, touches upon this subject in more detail.
I want to share a personal story with you that once again reminded me that learning to live with uncertainty is an emotional strength, a muscle to be flexed in order to experience a more meaningful and creative life.
Planning, laying down the bones, is the problem-solving element of creating. Here is where you will begin to give shape to your imaginings, your style, and your physical reality in order to lay out the blueprint of what you hope to create. You will take a good look at what it is that you envision and the space you have to work with so that you can create a plan that bridges your dreams and reality, transforming your creative vision into something real and tangible.
What does planning have to do with creativity? Think about it this way: When you are faced with any kind of dilemma or challenge, the thing that is most required is what is known as creative thinking. Remember when your teachers told you to “put on your thinking cap” ? What they were really telling you was to be creative — to think innovatively and figure out the best course of action or response. This is what you are doing as you work out a plan: thinking creatively in order to make something where there was nothing before. Continue Reading →
In Stage One, we invited our mind to look within and around us, to go foraging and gather up the berries and flowers of imagination. There is tremendous power in claiming our likes and dislikes, our dreams and yearnings, our aesthetic memories and walkabout observations. They are all fodder for the creative mill.
