Thursday! 3-16: A Brief Thought on Forgetting, Inspired by an Abandoned Flower Pot

V3, I16

I’m going to begin with a thank you, to all of you for your patience, your consideration, and you many kind notes of support and sympathy. I did not expect the events of the past few weeks. I sure as heck didn’t want them. But they happened, whether I like it or not. Your kindness has helped me more than I can tell you and I’m grateful.

This week’s Thursday! isn’t going to get all the way to normal. Honestly, the next couple might not either¹. Still, the show, and Thursday! must go on² so let’s see what happens. Okay? Okay.

Last summer I bought a pot full of pretty flowers — I don’t even remember what kind³. What I do remember is I wanted a pot full of pretty flowers to hang on a garden hook in the little patch of flower-friendly ground right outside my front door. They didn’t last very long. I about a month, I had a pot full of bedraggled stems⁴. Not long after that, the stems gave way to a weed that had somehow managed to get into the pot roughly two feet off the ground⁵. Not long after, I took the pot off the hook and set it on the ground, where it became a home to nettles and scrub weeds.

I tell you about this pot because I walk by it every day, yet hadn’t given it any real notice until a couple of days ago. Huh, I thought to myself. Has that pot been there the whole time? I guess it has. I remember those flowers. Shame I couldn’t keep them around long. And I went on my way. It only occurred to me later the things I didn’t do. For instance, I didn’t rehearse all the ways I failed to keep a pot of lovely flowers alive. I didn’t pummel myself for not racking up a plant-based success. I didn’t berate myself for letting the old pot get overrun with weeds.

[Please consider backing me up as a Patron. At $2, $5, or $20 you can support my work, my art, and get the occasional exclusive bonus goodie as easy as pie. Thank you!]

In fact, I shrugged off that particular failure (or few failures, if you like). This is something I’ve recently noticed I do a lot when I work with my various plants. I’ve not succeeded in every endeavor. I’ve killed off a couple plants, failed to pull a couple plants from the brink of disaster, messed up and tried again and messed up and tried a third time. I’ve checked reputable web sites, followed a couple excellent plant people on Instagram⁶, and done my research. I know a lot more about raising houseplants than I did a year ago and I expect I’ll know a lot more a year from today.

I have failed — quite often, really — but I don’t count the failures against me. When I get a new plant, I don’t think, Oh geez, here we go. Sure hope I don’t mess this one up like that other time. I don’t really think much of anything at all except how cool my new plant will look once I get it going good, which happens far more often than it doesn’t.

You probably see where I’m going here. If I can let my failures with plants roll off my back, I can probably do the same with my writing and so can you. We — you and me and all the other artist out there trying to make a go of it in a broken, wicked world — don’t have to wear failure like a hair coat. We don’t have to trash ourselves with them like thorn whips. We can note them, learn whatever lesson we want from them (even if that’s no lesson at all!), and move along to the next project.

We can, if we remember we can. But we forget, don’t we? I know I do.

I’ll do better to remember if you will, Maybe we can remind each other once in a while. Deal?

That’s it for this week. Thanks for sticking with me. Before you go, let me ask one more thing of you.

f you’re looking for a book full of clever and interesting stories, some of which will definitely give the strings of your heart a good tug, let me recommend Postcards from Mars. My story “The Paper Swans of Ellendell” is one of the 20-some-odd stories contained therein and it might be one of the two or three best, if I do say so myself. I bought my own copy and was impressed by how much story a good author can pack into only 50 words.

So please buy a copy so that, at the very least, I’ll earn enough in royalties to pay for the copy I bought! Buy two or three copies as gifts and maybe I can step up to buying the paper version.

1. Though, honestly, I can’t be sure. This is well outside my experience and I’m pretty much winging it.

2. Maybe “must” is a strong word but keeping this newsletter hot and interesting feels like a “must” to me.

3. Purple. They were purple.

4. Bedraggled Stems would be a great band name.

5. Funny how weeds find a way to thrive when nothing else does. Anyone want to be like a weed with me?

6. People who raise plants as a hobby themselves. Not…you know…plant people.