Flowering Fridays: Bloom It Big

It's a short and sweet message for today:

Whatever your dream is, bloom it big.

Nurture and water it with loving attention.

Know that its beauty is needed.

Know that even though others might have dreams like that look like your flower, it's not your flower.

Your unique flower is yours, and it's so very needed, too.

(Just trust me on this. Especially when the doubt comes up. Or the fear.)

If you have a seed of desire in your heart, give it the fertile soil in which to take root and sprout.

Image: Hyancith, February 2009

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Flowering Fridays is a weekly look at flowers through the lens of what they might teach us about flowering fully in our life. Past editions are here.

Monday Musings: On Nourishing Our Souls

"If we fail to nourish our souls, they wither, and without soul, life ceases to have meaning.... The creative process shrivels in the absence of continual dialogue with the soul. And creativity is what makes life worth living." — Marion Woodman

What will you do to nourish your soul this week? What will you create from your life? 

Image: Dahlias in Rhinelander, August 2008

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Attention Milwaukee, WI-area writers:

I'm honored that one of my favorite people and great writing teacher Judy Bridges invited me to be on a Get Published in 2010 panel (with some great authors) this Thursday, March 11 at 6:30 p.m., at Redbird Studios in Milwaukee. Details for the event are here.

Flowering Fridays: The Miracle That Has Always Been There

People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us. — Iris Murdoch, A Fairly Honourable Defeat

While I love flowers, I don't pause often enough to marvel at the true miracle it is to live among them. Or to appreciate the profound offering of love, beauty and joy they are to our life.

To think of a tiny seed or sprout, buried in dirt, struggling to grow leaves and stalk and then blossom into flower kind of blows my mind.

And then to see all the amazing variety of colors and shapes and fragrances and sacred center of flowers....well, it's like magic, and fairydust and sparkles on the grandest scale.

But the truth is I usually give the flowers a cursory glance.

Oh, I appreciate flowers. And I sometimes pause a while to really take them in.

But I don't really, truly appreciate the miracle the flower is in my life.

Or really any of life in general.

I don't often pause to appreciate the miracle of the sunset and sunrise each day. Or how the seasons change without any effort by humankind. Or how birds are so perfectly designed for flight.

The miracles, the beauty and the love are all around us. All the time.

The key, of course, is to be conscious enough to really notice and appreciate.

I am in Cleveland, Ohio, this week, cleaning out the last of the stuff from my mom's house with my sister.

It has been a bittersweet process, but this time it feels more sweet than last.

Yesterday, I was cleaning out my mom's office.

In the past, I could get into a story that my mom didn't really love me or that she wasn't proud of me.

And yesterday I saw the printouts and newspapers clippings from the launch of my book, Everybody Loves Ice Cream.

I saw the biography she wrote when she went into treatment for her addiction to alcohol and prescription drugs where she talked about how her kids were her pride and joy.

I saw photos of my mom — a young mom, just 18, having gotten pregnant her senior year of high school — holding me as a young baby, cuddling me with such love.

I remember having a conversation with my mom a couple years ago when I shared that I felt like a mistake because my parent didn't intend to become pregnant.

All I could focus on what that I wasn't wanted.

And my mom, gently, said to me, "Did it ever occur to you that you were so wanted?"

Um. No, until then, it hadn't.

I'm so thankful for the healing I've done on myself (and for the healing my mom had done in her recovery journey), that I was able to have those kinds of conversation with her before she died.

And I'm even more thankful that healing conversation with my mom continues as I clean out her stuff.

Part of the gift of my mom's death is that I'm getting even more deeply the love that's always been there.

The miracle of the gift we are to one other. That up until now, I have not fully appreciated.

Like I've done with flowers. And like I've done with the people who flower the garden of my life.

My intention is to really appreciate the miracles that are always there — the flowers, the people, all of life.

I think of this quote from Einstein:

"There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle."

I'd love to live more in this space.

It's where the joy and love and wonder is.

And all I have to do is shift where I'm looking.

Tell me, what are the everyday miracles you are noticing?

P.S. The opening quote I received as one of the free month of "ME Time" emails from Karen Wallace at The Calm Space.  I'm loving these short emails with their simple steps for finding time to nurture yourself, and the site itself is an oasis of serenity.

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Flowering Fridays is a weekly look at flowers through the lens of what they might teach us about flowering fully in our life. Past editions are here.

Image: Orchid at the Mitchell Park Domes, Milwaukee, December 2008