Garden Views: Foreground and Background

How do you know when it’s time to move on, to give up on a creative project? Is it ever time to give up? Maybe that’s not the right question.

While my garden writing isn’t seasonal, my garden scouting is. I’m used to switching gears at the beginning of May, starting to call for appointments and tour information, and dusting off the camera equipment --- moving the writing to the background and the scouting to the foreground.

In photography, the camera produces a very different picture depending upon whether the photographer emphasizes the scene in the foreground or the scene in the background. How would our projects look to us if we were able to move them in and out of our consciousness at will, without a sense of loss?

Graphics programs allow us to “move to back” or “move to front” at the click of a mouse. If we train ourselves to do this with our creative projects, perhaps we really never need to abandon those pieces that mean the most to us. We can move them to our mental foreground during pockets of time that crop up, and into the background when something more fruitful comes along.