Planting seeds in the creative process is a major responsibility. It is the core essence of any endeavour that involves creation. Every effort is significant and paramount for further steps.

It’s also an act of faith. It’s believing that a small idea that was born in the abstract can turn into a tangible form for the world to use or experience.

However, the process itself is invisible to your eyes. The seeds you plant today will grow at their own pace and in the darkness. Brian Eno, musician, composer, record producer and visual artist, has an invaluable take:

My kind of composing is more like the work of a gardener. The gardener takes his seeds and scatters them, knowing what he is planting but not quite what will grow, where, and when.

Quote taken from improvisedlife.com

Not knowing is the aspect that causes the most uncertainty. This is the part where it’s tempting to abandon a creation and move on to a different endeavour. It’s difficult to continue when conditions are, at first glance, discouraging.

While the seeds metaphor is subject to multiple interpretations, the common denominator is to remind the gardener or the creator that growth will take place sooner or later. Every little step compounds to a result, and the waiting process can be satisfying and joyful.

Here’s three perspectives on planting seeds in the creative process.

Your mind is a garden

All your ideas and recurring thoughts gather in this space. Whichever you choose to concentrate on is the one that either reveals next steps or gets you stuck. You may go all in for that writing project you’ve been visualizing, or you may allow self-doubt to hold you back.

What you focus on will expand.

Ultimately, planting seeds in your garden means choosing joy over will. In the words of poet, novelist, and diarist May Sarton:

Gardening is like poetry in that it is gratuitous, and also that it cannot be done on will alone. What will can do, and the only thing it can do, is make time in which to do it.

Young poets, enraged because they don’t get published right away, confuse what will can do and what it can’t. It can’t make a tree peony grow to twelve feet in a year or two, and it can’t force the attention of editors and publishers. What it can do is create the space necessary for achievement, little by little.

Quote taken from The Marginalian

What kind of ideas or thoughts are you letting grow in your garden?

Watering seeds requires consistency

It’s important to care for your seeds. Watering them consistently will ensure they become what they’re meant to become.

Watering may look like showing up every day to write a couple of pages, sketch a new vision or do research on a new business venture.

On the other hand, being attached to a specific outcome in your writing or creative craft might get you in a loop of frustration. The seeds can take a different form from what you originally envisioned, and that’s also okay.

You plant seeds in others

Your garden exists internally; however, you also have impact in other people’s gardens. Any kind of exchange with others is a way in which you’re planting a seed in them. That’s why it’s so valuable to share your creative process within a community or on a digital platform. You never know who you can inspire.

Never underestimate the power of your words or actions. You might not see how it impacts others, but you can be sure it’ll have an effect. Big or small, it’ll be there.

 

What do you think?