Flowering Onion

Hello there, friend. Today's post is a poem I penned after a profound experience with a creative coaching client. I fill my days with momming and making (music and books and sourdough, etc.!), but this walking alongside artists from all life stages and disciplines is another way I keep busy, and it is truly such a unique privilege. With artists, I explore the deeply spiritual invitation of creativity to help them become more wholeheartedly themselves as they move in the direction they want to go.

One day, a few weeks after my last call with a specific artist, a flutist by training, I received a package from her in the mail. It was a small, 4-inch by 4-inch oil painting of allium flowers, aka purple sensations, that she had painted herself. When I learned more about the plants themselves, and I reflected on the work the artist and I had done together in coaching, I was moved to tears. I wrote this prose poem with a deeply grateful heart.

If you are a multipassionate, multitalented person searching for permission or courage to be your whole self, I hope this will encourage you today.

Do you dabble in more than one art form? Is it difficult to balance your time, identity, and creative dreams within each discipline? I would love to hear about your experience in the comments.

If you are feeling the nudge to explore creative coaching with me, learn more here. I have some availablility from now until the end of the year. I’m here to help.

Now, the poem:

My life has become so colorful since I started working with blocked artists. So have my walls.

Your package arrives as a thank-you gift, and I am the thankful one.

You are a Flutist (or Flautist?) I don’t know how you choose to spell it, but either way, I know in your mind it is capitalized and always follows your name.

The note that accompanies the small package says that some call these flowers you’ve painted “purple sensations,” and your rendering in oil lives up to the name. I know this one—it is a flowering onion. The impossibly skinny stalk erupts unapologetically into a spikey, prickly ball, and the plant’s joy fills the small square frame you’ve meticulously covered in bubble wrap for the journey from your house to mine.

They don’t value oil painting as a skill set at the music conservatory, and you believe them when they say your painting practice is a beautiful waste of time.

Holding your creation in my weary hands, chapped from winter’s wind, I consider the bulbs waiting underground. I wonder if you know the difference between a flowering onion and a culinary one.

The color and life bounce from the canvas just like your flute’s staccato. Your voice, across art forms, sings.

Will you allow yourself to fill your life’s frame?

The strong and sturdy, flowering firework can be planted late into the fall; it is impervious to ravenous deer. But inside the same plant is a hefty-husked promise of sharp intensity and tearful pungency, the earthy sweetness that fills the house. These creations both exist inside one papery bulb.

What if our Creator never intended us to be only one thing?

The difference between the onions is a question of cultivation, patience, grace.

These are the shades of color, the gifts, I most long to give you.