Pollinating Your Creative Dreams

In addition to the wildflower season making its entrance here in the southern California desert, I enjoy sharing wildflower information with others through presentations around the valley. One demonstration everyone takes part in is the “petal pick.” I pass around a store-bought sunflower and ask each person to remove one petal. As it gets to the other side of the room, the flower is picked clean, often leaving about half the group without a petal to claim, and more importantly without any resemblance of a flower to enjoy. The whole flower represents a natural area, each petal represents a wildflower in that area. As you can imagine, it helps get the message across that with hundreds of visitors enjoying our wildflowers, if we each justify to ourselves, I’m just picking ONE flower, it can significantly alter the ecology by removing the resource and the beauty for future enjoyment.

 

It is exactly the same within each of us. Let a wildflower represent your personal ecology in the form of energy, a creative project, or a goal you are working toward. Just as you encounter positive elements each day, you also hit a few snags along the way. Some people (or situations) will come into your environment and it will seem as if someone has pulled off each of your petals for their own benefit. With what does that leave you? How will you propagate new ideas or attract positive thinkers (pollinators) now? How could you avoid this setback?

 

You might:

•  close up and plant yourself in a protected area so this can never happen—although I gaurantee it will happen eventually.
• have faith that your petals aren’t the only way to appeal to supportive pollinators, so no worries! (Some flowers rely more on scent or have UV patterns on other flower parts to attract pollinators, or they propagate themselves without pollination.)
• be happy that you’ve already been visited by some great pollinators of your creative ideas and you will flourish despite those bad seeds.

Or you can respond the way you were thinking deep down in your gut—which is 99% of the time always the best decision.

Wildflowers survive by enduring extended periods of less-than ideal environments, germinating only in years that offer the best opportunities for growth. They thrive by adapting to brief windows of opportunity in nature and in most years, you can’t miss it because they put on a spectacular, colorful show! Let nature inspire your interaction with positive and negative environments. Follow her lead in endurance, adaptation, and opportunity while nurturing your creative self; allow your creative efforts to enhance your nature with vibrant color, life, fragrance, a variety of creative blessings—make a big showing!

 

We must preserve the natural world; for without nature, there would be no beauty to inspire us.

~Hap Hagood