Delete the App, Find the Poem

It's in the Garden You Forgot You Were Growing

May 02, 2025

Welcome. We saved you a seat in the warm grass. This week, we’re meditating on how nature, family, and a hidden trail helped me reclaim my creative rhythm.

Yesterday morning, my brain felt elastic in the literal sense. My attention was more stretched, more taut, as if it were trying to envelop all my worries and desires.

I’ve had to take specific steps to gather it up again, to reduce the tension my stressed attention has caused.

The narrative words and ideas that often come up and bob on the surface of my consciousness are more scarce these days.

First step, I deleted the Instagram app from my phone.

I’ve had too many internal conversations that all cycle back to: how is scrolling through random clips and photos fueling my creativity? Short answer: it doesn’t.

What has been sparking new thoughts in me is being in nature. To clarify, being in nature without any agenda, sometimes I’ll be running, sometimes I’ll be walking. Each time I’ll just be being.

I went back and visited my parents and my younger brother, who lives near them, last week. We drove to a wooded path that was about two turns away from my childhood home. In all my thirty-five years of life, I never knew this green oasis existed.

This astounded me.

Part of why I was so ready to leave southern New Hampshire as a young adult was because it was all so known to me—everything was predictable, my loneliness, my isolation, my surroundings all so predictable.

I never predicted this. I never saw the bending willow that gracefully grazed the river’s edge. The looming canopy of trees providing shade for weary travelers was never on my radar.

It goes to show how much you really know when you think you know everything.

Walking over the pine needles and peering about at this immense beauty that seemed to emerge from thin air was humbling. It was humbling in a beautiful, perspective-widening way.

Talking with my brother, the ideas began to come, ideas for poems, ideas for narratives.

Stories about the magic that hides in plain sight, magic that hides in the wavering air for anyone still enough to see it.

This all reminds me of the Ghanaian saying,

Knowledge is a garden. If it isn’t cultivated, you can’t harvest it.

We often want to know everything now, have the skill or process already down yesterday. In limited cases, using the internet, we can make that happen.

I have been meditating on how most things worth knowing, most skills worth mastering, take deliberation, time, and dedication. You show up, then you show up again. You fail, learn specific lessons from that failure, and fail less next time.

In my mind’s eye, that is the art of cultivating. It is the dirty, earthy business of gardening, of pulling up weeds with thick roots—your unhelpful coping mechanisms, your cognitive barriers to achieving gradual compounding success—and planting seeds that you water, then prune.

It’s being out there, rain or shine. Telling yourself, I will take the first step. Write the first word, read the first page, go to the first class, and I will let the motivation and desire come from that.

I know all of this intellectually, but there are still days that I jump through so many mental hoops and I put so many mental barriers in front of myself—I’m too tired. I got a late start. I left dishes in the sink. I have clothes to fold. I’m out of ideas. I’m writing into the wind.

What I am about to say is not an exaggeration. Every single time, I have picked up my pen or opened my laptop and written anyway has been rewarding, often in a deeply felt way. I have never, not one time, regretted writing or developing my audio production business.

I try to keep that feeling of near elation after writing, or producing an audiobook, in my mind, when my brain starts lining up excuses for why I can’t drill down and focus.

I’m getting better at envisioning my more serene, accomplished, creativity-filled future self. The image feels more potent each time I conjure it.

How does envisioning your future self fuel your creativity, and/or put your behind in your writing chair?

Let us know in the comments below. If there was ever a time to use our words to empower each other, it’s now.

Writing Under the Palm Tree

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