“When you open yourself to the continually changing, impermanent, dynamic nature of your own being and of reality, you increase your capacity to love and care about other people and your capacity to not be afraid. You’re able to keep your eyes open, your heart open, and your mind open. And you notice when you get caught up in prejudice, bias, and aggression. You develop an enthusiasm for no longer watering those negative seeds, from now until the day you die. And, you begin to think of your life as offering endless opportunities to start to do things differently.”
― Pema Chödrön, Practicing Peace in Times of War
This month we explored the idea of our businesses as gardens and our community ran with it! Chats and contributors exploded with insight and parallels between entrepreneurship and cultivation. In a landscape that can often seem one size fits all, gardening is the perfect metaphor for building a business that supports and sustains. Evolving, beautiful, functional and inherently personal each of our gardens will look a little different depending on location, climate, investment, and the personality of the gardener. Most importantly to me gardening represents hope.
The concept of business being a lot like gardening has been a defining theme since 2011. That year I built myself a design consulting site with the tag line “Let’s Plant Something Beautiful Together” and a pay-what-you-can option called the Dream Garden. The design process led to the first ebook I made for OMHG: Cultivate Your Creativity. The site and book gave birth to a new seed: Heartweed. Heartweed was going to be a partnership between myself and another entrepreneur to build a digital magazine for creative entrepreneurs that collectively explored the idea of dreams and weeds to “unearth the heart of a creative life”. Life interrupted our plans so we mulched over the idea of Heartweed and left it to germinate. The site is still up and I visit it often to remind myself that some seeds take time to grow and others need to be weeded so that a bigger dream can take root. I won’t lie-sometimes tending our dreams is harder then others and despite my very best intentions some sweet seedlings have been neglected and left to wither. These lost blooms are relationships left untended, ideas started and ignored, projects half completed, emails still unsent. The larger OMHG grows the harder it becomes to caretake all the responsibilities and the more important is has become to learn how to be more mindful about how I am tending it.
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