Wednesday Wisdom #6 - The Flower Bucket

Marc and I were in Columbus over the weekend. Before we left town we stopped by the Clintonville Farmer’s Market. It’s the kind of place where the honey salesman tells you he can’t sell you anything until the bell rings and long lines form at booths as the opening hour approaches. An impressive cross-section of society shows up, toting baskets and reusable shopping bags.

I had been to the market once before, and someone had recommended a particular flower booth to me, so I made a bee-line for it (so many bee references today). The arrangements were glorious though none were exactly the color palette I wanted. In the end I chose one that had some sedum, sunflowers, and some pale purple lisianthus. The flowers survived the ride home and when I got there I started to arrange.

I mentioned my time on a floral residency at World’s End Farm in a previous post. One of the things that Sarah Ryhanen impressed upon me is that you have to get flowers out of your bucket that do not match your color palette. This was necessary because you would take your bucket out into the fields and harvest your flowers before arranging them. You were constantly assessing everything you saw - what was blooming, and what flowers and greenery might go with it? Sometimes you make a change part way through selecting your flowers, and something you selected earlier no longer makes sense. Sarah counseled that we had to get the flowers that no long went with the design out of our bucket. It was too confusing to design with something that didn’t belong mixed in.

On Saturday, when I finally got back to my house and began to arrange, I realized why the bouquets did not sit quite right with me. The purple lisianthus just didn’t go with the other flowers. I love lisianthus, its ruffles and long vase life, but its pale purple shade just didn’t go with the other blooms’ jewel-tone colors. It needed a bridging flower (something that made the lizzie make sense with the others, a flower that contained the main color palette and the pale purple). Once I removed the lisianthus, arranging what remained was easy.

I didn’t throw out the lisianthus. I put them in their own vase, and put them on the bathroom vanity. Later Marc commented how much he loved that flower displayed on its own. By removing it from an arrangement where it was a distraction, it became a focal point.

I imagine you can see where I’m going with this, but I’ll spell it out anyway. The flower bucket is a container for an arrangement. Within its boundaries, only what is related to the arrangement is included. In the same way our creative projects and portfolios have boundaries.

The process of creation is not linear. We have to go where the life is, so sometimes that calls for stopping one project that we have been working on, and moving on to another that has more vitality. I have picked up and put down my memoirs more times than I care to recall. There are times when writing belongs in my daily creative disciplines, and there are times when it does not. This continual process of assessment is a necessary element of a creative practice. What is asking to be created right now?

But then there are also moments when we stand back and look at the full slate of projects to which we are committed. Finding flow often requires letting go of that which no longer belongs, or finding it its own vase.

Let it go, and let it flow.