A few years ago, I was walking my dog when something unexpected happened.
I stopped to take a picture of the grass.
Not a sunset.
Not a flower.
Just grass.
The green was so intense that it stopped me in my tracks. At first, it appeared to be a single shade stretching across the landscape. But the longer I stood there, the more I noticed. Dark greens and light greens. Fresh growth and established growth. Different stages sharing the same space, each contributing something unique to the whole.
I found myself wondering how many times I had walked past that same patch of grass without really seeing it.
The moment stayed with me.
Not because the grass was extraordinary.
Because something in me had changed.
At the time, I had been committed to a daily creativity practice for nearly a year. Looking back, I don’t think that practice made me more creative. I think it helped me become more present.
For much of my life, I moved through the world reacting to it. I worried. I overthought. I carried responsibilities that were mine and responsibilities that weren’t. Through therapy, better boundaries, and a growing understanding of what I was responsible for and what I wasn’t, I began creating every day.
Not because I had grand artistic ambitions.
Because I needed somewhere for my attention to go.
Some days that creativity looked like collage or writing. Other days it looked like a walk through nature, preparing a meal with intention, or simply noticing the silky softness behind my cat’s ears.
What surprised me most was realizing that creativity didn’t always involve art supplies, a project, or a finished product.
Sometimes creativity looked like paying attention.
And the more I practiced paying attention, the more regulated I felt.
The more regulated I felt, the less reactive I became.
The less reactive I became, the more I noticed.
The world itself hadn’t changed.
The quality of my attention had.
What I didn’t realize at the time was that this simple practice of noticing was quietly preparing me for something else.
It was preparing me for whimsy.
For wonder.
For the realization that neither of them had ever left.
They had simply been waiting for me to slow down long enough to notice them again.
The Spark of Whimsy
Before wonder arrives, there is usually a smaller moment.
A spark.
A smile.
A feeling that says:
“Oh.”
For me, whimsy often arrives disguised as something small.
When I created my first pocket sticker for a journal project, it was a tiny Chinese takeout container filled with miniature egg rolls, fried rice, and soy sauce packets. Even now, it makes me laugh. Not because it changed my life, but because it delighted me.
Whimsy often works that way.
It arrives through a color, a texture, an unexpected idea, or a tiny detail that asks us to pause and look closer. It is the feather resting along a trail. The frogs singing across a pond. The happy accident that somehow improves a project.
For a long time, I thought these moments were distractions.
Now I think they are invitations.
Invitations to linger.
To play.
To remain open to surprise.
And if we accept that invitation, something else begins to happen.
The smile becomes curiosity.
The curiosity becomes fascination.
And before we realize it, whimsy has quietly led us somewhere deeper.
It has led us to wonder.
Wonder begins when we ask:
Tell me more.
The longer I looked at that patch of grass, the more I saw.
The longer I looked at the world around me, the more stories I discovered.
Years ago, a yoga teacher asked a room full of strangers to slowly walk around and make eye contact with one another. It sounded simple. It wasn’t.
I remember realizing how rarely I truly saw the people around me.
Not looked at them.
Saw them.
Since then, I have tried to move through the world differently.
To notice.
To connect.
To remember that every person I encounter is living a life as vivid and meaningful to them as my own is to me.
Wonder invites us into that realization.
Not only with people.
With everything.
The grass.
The frogs.
The feather.
The tree that dropped a leaf at exactly the right moment for me to find it.
Wonder doesn’t change the world around us.
It changes the quality of our attention.
And in doing so, it reminds us how much beauty has been there all along.
Creativity as a Response
For most of my life, I thought creativity was about making things.
Now I think creativity is a response.
A response to curiosity.
A response to beauty.
A response to wonder.
The first time creativity appears in my life, it helps me find my way back to myself.
The second time, it arrives because something has captured my attention so completely that I want to engage with it.
Wonder asks a question.
Creativity becomes my answer.
One of the most meaningful creative projects I ever completed was a traveling journal centered around the idea of sisterhood.
Not the sisterhood I experienced.
The sisterhood I imagined.
Road trips. Movie nights. Shared adventures. Small moments of connection.
As I created those pages, I wasn’t simply making a journal.
I was exploring a possibility.
For a while, I got to live inside that imagined experience.
The journal itself is gone now, lost through a series of circumstances beyond anyone’s control.
Yet I do not feel that I lost what mattered most.
The experience remains.
The exploration remains.
The connection remains.
No one can take that away.
Because the most important thing I created was never the journal itself.
It was the experience of engaging with something that mattered deeply to me.
That, more than any finished project, feels like the true gift of creativity.
Not what we make.
But who we become while we are making it.
Hope Lives in the Return
For much of my life, I thought hope meant having answers.
A plan.
A guarantee that everything would work out exactly as I wanted it to.
Over time, life has taught me otherwise.
I no longer believe hope lives in certainty.
I think hope lives in the return.
It lives in the quiet realization that when life gets loud, I know how to find my way back.
Not perfectly.
Not instantly.
But consistently.
The path is familiar now.
I create.
I notice.
I become curious.
Whimsy appears.
Wonder follows.
I respond.
I reconnect.
And somewhere along the way, hope returns too.
Not because my circumstances have changed.
Because I have.
Or perhaps because I have returned to the parts of myself that were there all along.
The parts that know how to pay attention.
The parts that still believe ordinary things are worthy of wonder.
The parts that remember how to play.
I hear it in the frogs singing across the pond.
I cannot see them.
I do not understand their language.
Yet somehow their voices remind me that life is happening all around me, whether I fully understand it or not.
These moments do not solve my problems.
They do not remove uncertainty.
What they do provide is something far more valuable.
They remind me that I am alive.
They remind me that I am connected.
They remind me that I belong.
Like the many shades of green growing side by side in the same patch of grass, each of us contributes something unique to the landscape.
Different seasons.
Different stories.
Different stages of growth.
All part of the same whole.
When I remember that, something inside me softens.
The future feels a little less intimidating.
I may not know exactly what comes next.
But I know this:
Wonder is still available.
Whimsy is still available.
Creativity is still available.
And when I lose sight of them, I know how to begin again.
I know how to return.
Sometimes I think back to that patch of grass.
The grass was never really the point.
The point was that I noticed it.
Perhaps that is what this journey has been teaching me all along.
Not how to become more creative.
But how to return.
To curiosity.
To connection.
To the quiet awareness that life is happening all around me and within me.
The grass is still green.
The frogs are still singing.
The world is still full of stories waiting to be discovered.
And so am I.
