Forage | A September Creative Date
We met because of flowers. My friend Myca is a floral designer who has a boutique floral design studio in nearby Sheridan (if you’re a Wyoming bride, call her). I knew the first time I saw her work that we were kindred spirits, and after our first conversation, I think both of us knew we would one day create together.
It’s something that comes of friendship and creativity and foraging gone wild.
In August she messaged me with words something like this: I keep thinking of you, and the coming rabbitbush bloom, and a creative day together.
That creative date came in September, when I arrived at her house one morning at 7:00 and she had just pulled blueberry scones from the oven, necessary nourishment for the coming hours of foraging and making. We pulled out of her driveway with a load of buckets, clippers, and loppers, with no other plan than to head south until we found the blooming rabbitbrush. I’d seen it every autumn for the last thirteen years, but last fall is when I first noticed it, this wonderful wild bush that blooms a stunning ochre yellow in early fall across the arid, windswept grasslands of Wyoming.
By lunchtime we’d loaded up with rabbitbrush, and sage, too, and we’d circled back north and gathered claret-red chokecherry, cattail, and wispy wild clematis vine. We brought the harvest back to my house and heaped it in piles around the terrace. At the picnic table, we sat, eating a quiche I’d made for lunch, while we discussed just what we were going to make with all this loveliness.
Then, we got to work.
It was synergy and flow, of ideas spilling, and ideas becoming. Other than deciding the basic structure and form, we didn’t really even talk about how this creation would come to be … we just made it, together. It was the kind of creative experience that catches your breath and brings tears to your eyes.
By the day’s end, there it was, a moment of wild beauty, for the sake of friendship and making, and honoring what nature so abundantly provides.
P.S. If you’d like to see, here’s a reel about our day.