Be the Ripe and Rotting Fruit

Plant Inspired Affirmations for your Creative Process

Photo of Poppies by Laura Tait

Dear Shapeshifters,

We are on a planet spinning through vast galaxy of stars and we are surrounded by gloriously creative and inspiring beings of all species. We are immersed in this glittering and flowering world and yet, we are bombarded with the cruelty of colonial systems that try to prevent our ongoing connections with and reverence for these beings.

Yet the plants and animals and stars continue to sing their songs, to call out to us.

Plants are some of our greatest teachers in shapeshifting, being with change, creating beauty and magic and medicine, even and especially amidst the horrors.

For example, the Poppy:

An ancient symbol of death, fertility, spilled blood, and ephemerality said to grow in the footsteps of Demeter as she grieved, the seeds of the Corn Poppy (Papaver Rhoeas) can lay dormant for up to 100 years, their seeds only germinating in disturbed soils - finding ways toward the sunlight through pockets of air created by tilled fields, but also wastelands, war zones. This capacity to bring beauty amidst these conditions has also made the Poppy a symbol of beauty amidst destruction, and life in the midst of death.

Demeter Mourning for Persephone, Evelyn De Morgan, 1906

In times as ripe with horrors as ours, the Poppy makes me wonder at a seed that can lay dormant for a century, but in the face of devastating violence to the land and one another, responds, and awakens with vigor, returning from the underworld, bringing us beauty, medicine, and awe. The Poppy makes me wonder what other small beauty has laid dormant, waiting for these particular times and conditions to erupt and blanket the ruins of our times.

Plant Inspired Affirmations for your Creative Process

1. Be the ripe and the rotting fruit. Embrace decay as a part of your process. Your creative process does not have to be ceaselessly prolific. Your creative process gets to breath, fluctuate, change shape, direction, medium, and pace; need different things at different times. We are allowed to be seasonal beings. Instead of rooting our creative practices in capitalist expectations of endless productivity at the expense of ourselves and the earth, we can have creative practices that look more like ecosystems. We can root our creative practice in attunement to ourselves and others, with seasons and cycles of growth and decay, flowering and fruiting, rotting and resting and adding nutrients to the soil below.

2. Your creative process does not have to result in something massive to be medicine. Your creative process gets to be pleasurable, playful, and nourishing. When we allow our creative practices to be less product oriented, more process oriented, less driven by perfectionism and more driven by nourishment, we are more likely to return to that creative practice. We are also likely to feel more resourced, especially as grievers, in not necessarily having to “make something of our grief”, but rather recognizing the need to create spaces for grief’s expression, which includes rest.

3. All art making is collaborative. Tend to your ecosystems. Nourish what nourishes you. None of us creates (or does) anything alone. If you are feeling stuck and depleted and tunnel visioned in your creative process, remember to look around. The world is alive and asking to collaborate. We are always in a dialogue. Sometimes we just need to create space to listen to the songs of the world. We rely on ecosystems of support and inspiration. Who has come before you and tried to make a richer soil for you? Where are the pollinators and your mycelial webs? Where are you already being fed? How can you nourish what nourishes you?

4. The world is alive and animate, and so is your creative process. Instead of approaching your creative process as if it were inanimate, or a resource to be extracted, you can approach it as an animate force that you get to be in relationship with, collaborate with, get to know and honor. You can approach each art piece, idea, project as if it too were alive and animate. If you’re stuck, you can ask your art what it wants to do. What might it say to you?*

5. Creative expression is for everyone. The whole universe is doing it all the goddamn time. Life can be lived as art. Creating is a birthright for every being on this planet. Capitalism and colonialism tell us that we are meant to be consumers and laborers but not makers, dreamers, and artists. But plants remind us that art and creativity is infused into the fabric of the every day, and our own art making need be separate from everyday life. Making is a earthling thing, and a cosmic one.

6. Under systems of power that condition us against feeling, dreaming, and creative expression, your creative process gets to be as crucial as other forms of daily self and collective care. This doesn’t mean overpowering your need for res when you don’t feel like creating. This means not belittling or dismissing your desire to create when it comes, even and especially when it comes amidst the ruins. Write your poems on the half destroyed walls as an act of love for this world. Be the poppies blooming in the battlefield. Be the flowers blooming on the roots of the tree overturned by the storm. Remind others that beauty is here too as if this fact were as essential for life as drinking water. We get to make our creative process a process of attuning to the world and ourselves. As Audre Lorde and plants remind us, our creativity is not a luxury, it is how we survive.

*Thanks Pat Allen & JSP for these questions!

An invitation to spend this year in collaboration with flowers and cycles of decay 💗🌸🎨

If this post resonated with you and you’d like to join me and spend your year in creative collaboration with plants, their magic and wisdom, our Tears of the Gods 2025 Cohort begins in just a few weeks. There are scholarships available (forms here) and the course is discounted through 1/15 (tomorrow!).

In this year long virtual plant walk, we sink into the stories and magic of a different plant each month, as they relate to death and grief, and create art inspired by them. As the plants accompany us through the journey of the year and whatever it brings, we also accompany one another, sharing and celebrating one another’s stories, crafts, art pieces, and reflections.

5% of proceeds will go to mutual aid efforts here and abroad, and be split equally between Many Lands Mutual Aid in Gaza and Be-loved here in Appalachia, who are providing critical support to Hurricane Helene affected areas.

You can also read more about this offering in my most recent post besides this one:

---

Subscribe to Grief Spells

Your subscriptions help support my work and help us skirt the whims of the algorithm! As of right now, all subscription tiers (including free) will receive access to seasonal grief spells.

You can also support my writing by ​becoming a paid subscriber​ to this newsletter for $16-20/month 💖 Your paid subscriptions help me so that I don't have to spend as much time marketing, and can instead focus on creating and doing what I love. THANK YOU!

Paid subscribers will also get access to live community events each season. These Grief Studios will be spaces to dialogue with, make, and share your own art and writing alongside other grievers. 🕸️