Creative Seed Pods

In Arizona, we are entering the Season of Seeking Shade. Oranges stop growing, figs dry on the branches, birds sit in the tiniest patches of shades, beak open.

Seed pods ready for threshing

But there is another fascinating process that unfolds in the heat. Native trees produce seed pods. Most of them are hard and protective–understandable, soft seeds would wither and dry up in hours. Nothing rots here; it’s too dry. Leaves that drop, branches that blow down rot in weeks on the East Coast. Not so here. You’ll find them years later, just where they fell. They will be the bones of trees, bleached and stiff, but not rotting.

In order for seed pods to free the seeds, they need a threshing machine. Well, something to break open the pods so the seeds can drop to the dirt and wait for rain. Unless those pods break open, the seed can’t put out roots.

The lucky trees are the ones planted close to sidewalks and roads. The pods fall, we stomp or drive over them, the pods are crushed, the seeds released and ready to be washed into a gully to grow.

I was crunching over pods yesterday, loving the hollow, rattly sound the seeds make in the pods, when I thought how this is creative work. Well, it is like creative work. You have an idea, but it’s not ready to work, to grow, to connect with us. You create an idea-pod, but you hoard it. Nothing happens.

Then you drop it and other people walk over it, kick it aside, roll over it, and suddenly, you can see it in a fresh new light, ready to grow. And that’s when you see that letting it go, not forcing it was what it took to break out into a project that you can do. You had to let it go to make it work.

Liz Crain, one of the contributors to the Traveling Journals project, describes it perfectly here. She had to give the idea-pod time to grow, ripen and pop open before she could work with it. Make sure to take a peek at the results. Wonderful!

–Quinn McDonald is a writer, life- and creativity coach. She also trains people in business communications and teaches raw art journaling while managing those Traveling Journals

Adjusting to a New Location the Artist’s Way

You move someplace new. How do you make yourself feel at home? What does it take to get used to a location that is different in many ways to the home you left behind? If you work, you meet new people right away, and they will point out their favorites stores, theaters, restaurants, activities. You work with new people, you adjust.

You’ll notice the differences first. The things that are the same don’t stand out, but the differences do. So when I landed in a place 2,500 miles from my starting location, I had the same experience, but through the eyes of an artist. One of the first things I did was buy a handful of different colored pencils–I had plenty of greens from the East Coast landscape, but I needed purples, grays, tans, and yellows for the desert.

Looking around, I noticed that the trees were different. A lot different. Most of them didn’t have big leaves, there was one that had a green trunk and no leaves. I discovered it was the Palo Verde, a tree that sheds its leaves in summer to protect itself from the heat. The green trunk does the work of photosynthesis.

What fascinated me was the seed pods. Trees in a searing climate protect their seeds in hard-cased pods that twist open in the rain, or look delicious to birds, who carry the seeds away and plant them with a dollop of fertilizer. I’d gather up seed pods during walks, put them on the drawing table, only to discover that the next morning, they had twisted open enough to shoot seeds across the room. Some of them have thorns to hitch a ride. I discovered those as I walked barefoot across the carpet. Others have sails on them to carry them on the wind.

The desert is an amazing place of great beauty and amazing variety. If you visit it, bring a camera. It changes every day, and everything is worth photographing.

–Images: color pencil on 100-lb Bristol board by Quinn McDonald

–Quinn McDonald is an artist who is endlessly fascinated at how plants, animals and people adjust to their environments. She is a certified creativity coach and a life coach specializing in transitions. See more at QuinnCreative.com