The Shoot You're Meant To Tend
I'm addicted to new ideas. I absolutely love when an idea surfaces and I can see it's unfolding in my mind. I get excited and begin putting together the next steps of what I need to make it a reality.
However, more often than not, another idea emerges and it's just as exciting and I want to put that one together also, so I abandon the last one. “I've worked it out, I know what needs to be done when I have time.”
Except, I don't, because yet another idea has come into being, and rather than a fully realized idea I have a burial ground of half-started projects that all could have been something.
I have probably done this a million times in my lifetime and only now do I realize the pattern. I've always proclaimed to have a weak relationship with the Wood Element, and here in the awareness of one of my biggest tendencies and its sabotage, I am being offered the opportunity to work with its medicine.
To navigate the gap of emergence and flourishing.
We give much attention at this time of the year to the tender shoot breaking through. Celebrating its ability to come forth from the depths of the earth, up and into the light. That readiness, the innate impulse of the Wood Element. However, what we often fail to honour is what comes afterwards.
Discernment and boundaries as an act of love.
What I've learned in noticing this pattern is that its impossible to give each and every idea the same amount of resources. I only have so much to give, and to try to give every tender shoot equal attention also means giving each one equal neglect.
To say it's been difficult is an understatement. Learning to let an idea surface without immediately attaching to it, that has required something of me I didn't expect. There's a quiet grief in setting something down, even when you know it isn't the one. A small mourning for the version of you that was going to do that thing.
And yet. The feeling of wholeheartedly choosing, of turning toward one shoot and saying, you, I'm tending you, has been unexpectedly liberating.
It has opened up an entirely new relationship with the Wood Element. To revel in its benevolent devotion rather than be scattered by its abundance.
Right now, the shoot I am tending is my art and my writing. Not as a side practice, not as something I fit in around the edges. But as the thing I am orienting toward with intention this season. Writers have to write. Artists have to make art. The flourishing follows the tending, not the other way around.
This is what Wood asks of us in April. Not more ideas. Not more beginning. Just the courage to tend the one thing most ready to become.
A writing prompt for your own inquiry:
Which idea have you been tending, and which ones are you ready to set down with love?
What would it mean to give one thing your whole attention this season?
XO
Ashley
PS: Each month I choose a print that speaks to the elemental season we're moving through. If you've been curious about receiving it — along with the love letter I write to go with it — April is a beautiful time to step in. Click Here For Details.