The Colour Collaborative: March: Bud

Buds.  A universal symbol of spring.  Every year we look for them.  We wait and watch, never knowing exactly when they'll be here.  It's something the plant works out with nature, with its environment.  And when the time is right, there they are.

Enclosed tightly at first in pale greens and browns and the old bleak colours of winter.  Just a hint, a suggestion of something more to come.

It happens slowly, slower even as we watch so avidly.  But as the days tick by and our little patch of earth tilts a touch closer to the sun, there's a glimpse of something more, a sliver of colour, the edge of a petal, the promise of life.

From the palest of baby pinks to the most vibrant raspberry, every tone and every colour is there.

Every sensational flower, every dramatic, showy bloom, and every subtle one too, they have all emerged from drab overcoats with an explosion of sensory overload.  Colour, texture, scent, sensuality.

Not every bud makes it.  Some are lost, frozen, plucked, knocked from their stems.  Life is hard, storms are frequent.  That's why there are always more buds.  The plant keeps trying.  If one lot of buds doesn't succeed, more are sent forth.

Some flower and go no further.  Petals fall and the idea is gone.  But sometimes, when there are kindly bees and gentle rains and the softest of winds, you look one day at the place where there was a bud, and if you are lucky you find fruit.

For me, the colours of spring are pale pinks and greens and whites.  Subtle colours that hum but don't shout.  The colours of apple blossom and magnolia.

As I thought about buds this week, it occurred to me that ideas are like buds.  They are there, waiting, just waiting, for the time to be right.  They are delicate, easily damaged.  They are slow, shy, tentative.  Often they are lost to storms and circumstances.  But sometimes they flower, these ideas of ours, and when they do they are beautiful to behold.  Bold and strong and tremendous.  Because they are a little part of us, that we have opened out to the world, that we have been brave enough to try.  Despite the ideas that didn't happen, we've tried again.  And sometimes, just sometimes, after an idea there's fruit.

Of course, occasionally it's a lemon.

Right now, I have a little idea of my own.  Something that might be a bud or it might not.  A plan for the future, that I might make work or I might not.  But to try is everything right?  Do you have a dream that deep down you wish you could pursue?  Is there something that might make it happen?  A small step you could take on the path to the place you wish you could be?  Wishing you bravery and flowers and fruit, CJ xx

To visit the other Colour Collaborative blogs for more of this month's posts, including one from March's guest blogger, Sarah at Mitenska, just click on the links below:

Annie at Knitsofacto                                             Sandra at Cherry Heart                                       

Gillian at Tales from a Happy House                     Jennifer at Thistlebear                                          

Sarah at Mitenska

What is The Colour Collaborative?

All creative bloggers make stuff, gather stuff, shape stuff, and share stuff. Mostly they work on their own, but what happens when a group of them work together? Is a creative collaboration greater than the sum of its parts? We think so and we hope you will too. We'll each be offering our own monthly take on a colour related theme, and hoping that in combination our ideas will encourage us, and perhaps you, to think about colour in new ways.