Out of Chaos an organizing newsletter
Dead-heading
No, this newsletter isn’t about following the Grateful Dead. Dead-heading is a gardening term that our wonderful Charlottesville hostess taught my nine-year-old son during our visit in the spring. Dead-heading is pinching off the flowers that have already bloomed and wilted, encouraging more blooms to grow. According to the Burpee Web site: “Dead-heading keeps gardens neat and blooming…plants—like all of us—need boundaries.”
Well said, Burpee. As a totally novice gardener, I am just discovering the meditative qualities of pinching the wilting blooms from my little wine-crate planters. Every time I do it, I think about how it is such a metaphor for what I do with clients every day.
After all, what is a stretched-out sweater or an outdated opera schedule but something “past it’s bloom.” Many of my clients crave abundance, they fear that I am a mean minimalist there to enforce austerity and monochromatic color schemes. Nothing could be further from the truth. I love color. I love abundance, but what is the good of it if we can’t see it? It makes perfect sense to me that by pinching off the old stuff and discarding it we not only make room for new, beautiful stuff, but we actually improve our lives and make them more beautiful and more abundant.
So look around your house: What can you dead-head? How about discarding those old magazines or the stockings where the elastic is loosing its oomph? Get rid of the dead, the shoddy, the faded and outdated and then see what blooms.