There’s something going on with my driveway.
For the better part of the year, patches of clover have cropped up in the zigzag cracks near the street. I’d love to tell you that I accepted these tufts of weeds as part of my natural landscape, but I definitely did not. I’ve pouring boiling water on them in hopes of scalding the roots. Lemongrass in a spray bottle. The herbicides you can pick up in the lone lawn aisle at Target.
Each time the clover came back, rowdier than ever and ready to party. As I type this, the cracks in my driveway are fuzzy and green, even as the grass and trees begin to fade.
As it turns out, clover’s ridiculously resilient. It grows even in crappy, rocky soil, is drought-resistant, and supplies its own nitrogen stores. Reading this on a corner of the internet one morning gave me a newfound appreciation for this tough little weed. No matter what I want, or my neighborhood would prefer, clover does its own thing. It even creates its own fuel so it can thrive no matter where it shows up.
Now I want you to think about yourself as a creative and a human.
Do you give yourself permission to show up in spaces where you can thrive, even if other people would rather you not?
Do you know how to create your own fuel when your relationships and environment are lacking?
Most importantly: Do you know how to come back through the cracks when you fail?
Because you will fail, wild heart. We all do. We don’t get up early to write when we wanted to, we don’t finish that watercolor we’ve been working on for months or years. We let someone down so we can steal a few minutes with ourselves.
There’s only one way I know how to keep coming back to my desk even when I’d rather do everything else, and that’s to settle deep into the seed of who you are when you’re fully underground.
What thrills and excites you? What brings you—and only you—pleasure and joy? What about today’s world alarms you most, before your neighbors or the news tell you what should matter?
Use those things, be those things. Embody them all.
Each day, no matter when you can, give yourself twenty minutes to lean into the thoughts, ideas, and feelings that make you, you. Turn off the music, put your phone in airplane mode, and say this:
I am making this sacred.
It doesn’t matter if your desk is a hot mess or you feel like whatever you make in those twenty minutes sucks. The word sacred is derived from sacrare in Latin, which means to dedicate. The whole point is in the intention of twenty whole-hearted minutes of dedication, not in what comes from it or what you look like or smell like or who’s screaming for your attention.
Make it sacred.
Something magical happens when you sit down with the intention to dedicate yourself to yourself. Eventually, you begin to make your own fuel. You begin to thrive in places you once felt uncomfortable.
You grow in all the cracks, despite the odds.
