The Art of Softly Blooming

I write better at night.

When the night is quiet and soft, I find myself tapping my internal pondering into words. Often finishing my posts at 3 AM in the morning.

Sometimes, I would be frustrated at myself because it doesn’t fit my vision of writing within a normal working timeframe.

You know, the writer at the coffee shop.

My creativity seems to rebel against this and I’m extremely distracted at the coffee shop. The ebb and flow of my writing is drawn to the dark softness of the night, when everyone else is sleeping.

So I’ve given up on forcing it out during the day light - allowing my writing to softly bloom during the night.

Over the years, I’ve learnt to be less harsh on myself.

Yes, the inner Virgo perfectionist still remains, but it’s a lot softer these days. Less about fast growth and more about soft intentional growth. I think of it as still honouring my inner Virgo by syncing to nature’s rhythms - you may notice that I’ m into my astrology, even though for some it is nonsense.

I’ve also taken the same soft growth stance with my hand studies, albeit it took several sausage finger paintings before changing course

Building Soft Foundations

I like to paint without sketching first because you can build dimensions by layering the paint. However, I’m also very confident with certain subjects such as landscapes and cityscapes. So with my hand studies, I thought I believed one could apply the same approach.

I was wrong!

On Monday morning, I attempted several times to paint a rather complex hand that resulted to sausages. So I gave in by pulling out my pencils and finding a tutorial on sketching hands. Though it took a full day to break the complexity into the simple geometric shapes and understand hand angles, it was definitely worth it. As you can see, a refresher course resulted in 100% improvement. No sausage fingers here, though more practice is needed..

The world often screams louder, faster, and AI-acceleration.

However, our bodies often retreat to mother nature’s rhythm. In winter, we crave a later start or a slower pace as nature regenerates through hibernation. While, I know hibernating during the winter months is unrealistic, I do think we can intentionally slow down and soften in other ways.

And this doesn’t have to be life changing.

Simple intentional slow softness in savouring food, consuming less mindless short-form content, making coffee at home or wearing your favourite scent while working from home.

I believe these intentional soft shifts helps us to tune into our natural rhythm helping us regenerate during the winter months. So we softly bloom into the spring.