Roads to Joy

I’ve been doing a small, daily gesture for our neighbour, which involves opening a dodgy greenhouse door in the morning as the sun begins to heat the air inside, and then closing it again, with gentle care, as the cool of late afternoon returns.

One plant in full blossom, must be an azalea, has been catching my eye as I amble across the way to oblige on the door task. Its intensity, in full sunlight, is dazzling. Realising that I should record something of this bedazzlement, this passionate, vibrant hue, I set to, but after my first snaps, I moved on to find other flowers showing off a single colour, like the bright yellow poppies and some intense blue blossom on our Ceanothus at our front door.

For what it’s worth, I’ve sometimes been accused of being too intense, myself. And I know that there are some topics that I can be fiercely passionate about. In my view, that’s not a bad thing, but I recognise that these passionate outbursts can sometimes verge on the obsessive. Some have even called them rants! But you’d never blame a flower of excessiveness. It just does its thing, as it were, with innocent aplomb, never minding that its display might be seen by we humans as gratuitous.

Creativity, I think, seems to flow from a place that ignores the shackles of editorial constraint, the strictures that we place on ourselves that tell us, ‘Surely you’re not good enough to imagine you could do that!’ It’s unselfconscious, in a word. A veritable blossom that is just there, springing unrestrained from our imagination. Perhaps, like a blossom, it’s shouting out, ‘See me! Consider me!’ as if to attract visiting pollinators.

The pollinators, of course, must act as the editors in this display. Evolutionary theory might suggest that the brightest, most beckoning blossoms attract the most insects, so that their pollen can be carried to fertilise other bright flowers. And creativity too, I’ve noticed, carries with it a sense of need, a desire to be considered, to be compared and contrasted with other creations by those who look on, or who dive into, the work that the effort has presented. We can think of shared creativity as a cross-fertilisation of ideas, and we wouldn’t be far wrong.

So if that’s the joyful lesson of the blossoms, for me today, I won’t complain at all. Rather, I will try to apply this object lesson in personification to my daily efforts, whatever they might be.