Why “Passionflower’s Canvas”?

In October, H. was pestering nagging encouraging me to join an online writing group and start a blog. Once upon a time, during that brief period when we were living in the same city but did not yet have children, we used to meet at a coffeeshop once a week and write. We aren’t likely to have a similar opportunity again until our small children are in college, so she offered up a digital alternative. I was hemming and hawing mainly because…I couldn’t think of a name for my blog.

Let me start by saying that I don’t look like a “Passionflower.” In many ways, I am a resounding example of “normal” or “standard” without appearing extraordinary. My build is well proportioned with no particular feature standing out. My hair is a “medium” brown with some red, some blond, some gray, with no particular color taking center stage. In the winter I wear a uniform of khakis, white shirt, and some form of sweater. I have a job in the technology industry that certainly doesn’t scream “passionflower.” With two small kids, a husband, and a full-time-plus job 70 miles from my house, there’s barely time to trim my nails or dry my hair, let alone cultivate passion. And yet, one day, someone on Hayhouse Radio (I think it was D*enise Linn, or maybe S*onia Choquette) called me to do so.

I was doing a time-consuming but rote task at work and listening to Hayhouse on headphones to make the act of verifying translations of CD labels more pleasant. The whole show was about connecting with your spirit, and the host kept asking callers to name their spirits. Every caller hesitated. “Come on,” she’d encourage, “if you had to make up a name, what would it be? Tell me the first thing that comes to you.” And they’d come up with something. Could I name my spirit? What part of my spirit would I name? What is the essence of me, without the kids, husband, job, education, experiences? When those are stripped away, what is left?

Passion + Flowers = Passionflower

In the moments when I can still my mind, I rely on my body for guidance. I feel my intuition in my heart, the heart in my physical chest, and then I see pictures. This time I saw my heart, sporting a few old wounds but quite healthy overall. Maybe it was all those trips to a local science museum that had a heart big enough to walk through when I was a child, but I have a clear vision of what a real heart (not a Valentine heart) looks like. When I thought of the word “passion,” flowers started sprouting from my heart and opening. I felt the opening, the flowering, in every part of me, the way the oxygen gets carried to the cells in every part of your body. So passion flowers (verb), and I decided that my spirit was a flowering of passion, a passionflower.

Canvas

Although writing is certainly a compelling practice for me, this blog is not called “Passionflower’s Notebook” because it wouldn’t convey the whole picture. If I were to call myself a writer only, I would be denying the part of me that longs to create visual beauty. So, even though you haven’t seen evidence of it on the blog yet, I wanted to be an artist long before I knew how to read or write. My favorite gift the Christmas when I was 5 was a big Crayola set with pastels, paints, colored pencils, and crayons. It still chokes me up to remember hearing my mother’s father (who died when I was six) say, “I never saw anyone so small draw so well.” When I was in elementary school, my mother kept me out of school on my birthday and took me to an awesome art museum in the big city nearby (because that’s what I wanted to do). When I cut school as a senior, I went to the same art museum. By the time I was 8, I knew on exactly which shelves at the library to look for books on the Impressionists and Picasso, and I checked them out on a regular basis, right next to my Beverly Cleary and Sweet Valley High books.

The tagline of this blog is “One woman’s journey to rediscover her creative spirit.” I don’t know where those words came from, I don’t remember crafting them in my mind, so they must have been my spirit speaking. If I am to rediscover my creative spirit, it’s going to be a multimedia activity, with physical and digital canvases as well as words painting images for your to create in your own heads. So that’s why this space is more than a notebook, it’s Passionflower’s Canvas.