More than the vision.

Native perennials, the blueprint, and growth that looks different than you pictured.

For the past few weeks, every time I walk up to my house, I feel a wave of overwhelm looking at my front flower beds.

I have slowly been investing in native perennials. I found a wonderful nursery and buy a few small plants at a time, ones that bloom across different seasons and attract pollinators.

Each spring and fall, my bare hands seek out any exposed spot of soil and fill it with another baby plant. Because I am choosing plants that bloom summer, spring, fall, even winter, my heart fills with excitement to see my vision match what I have planted.

Now that the reality is arriving, it's not quite the picture I had envisioned. That's leaving me even more excited.

These flowers and plants are growing bigger, fuller, and in most cases, much differently than I expected. Yes, I could have read the tags more closely and noted more than just their light and watering needs, like maybe how tall or wide they might get, versus what I decided they would be in my mind's eye.

I was too busy watching my vision come to life to slow down for the fine print.

That overwhelm I feel walking up to the house midsummer to what feels like an overgrown lot that will get ticketed by the city, I am recognizing is not the feeling of getting it wrong. It's the feeling of something being more alive than I bargained for. What I planted is working. It is just not showing up in the shape I'd imagined.

The vision, it turns out, was a direction, not a blueprint. The refining happens live, once things are actually in the ground and growing. I get to keep shaping. I can move something, cut something back, let something spread.

Change is always an option. The picture in my head was never meant to be obeyed exactly. It was meant to get me started.

I am living out a similar lesson with Honest Hours. I can't believe we are halfway through the inaugural cohort! It is amazing to witness what it has become and is still becoming.

When I built it, I had a vision, well more of a feeling really, for what it could be. I could see the shape of it and trusted it would become something very special.

What it has actually become is richer than the version I imagined. Each woman is experiencing her own growth, and with the support of the others, their visions are coming to life faster than they would have on their own.

What moved me most in our last session was watching them support each other with no expectation of getting anything back. That and watching them try things today that they most likely would be pushing off if they were they doing it alone.

These women are taking what was living on the page and giving it life in the real world, open to the possibilities of what it will become.

That is the part you cannot plan for. You plant with a vision, you trust it, and then you let it become something bigger than the picture you started with.

Look at something you are building and notice where the reality has outgrown your original plan. It might not be a mistake. It might just be more alive than you expected.