personal project + community
My friend Amanda and I carried out a community project to add a little brightness to some person's day.
The quote "bloom where you're planted" came to mind as I thought about what message I could relay. Although the source of this quote isn't very clear, I've heard it a number of times, and it's always resonated with me. I think of beautiful flowers blooming in hard and not-typical places, and that's the visual I wanted to demonstrate.
After buying a bouquet of flowers at A Village of Flowers, we started looking for places to place them. We first used the beautiful and bright dragon mural in Hillsboro Village as a backdrop for some photos and then realized there was a perfect place to hang one of the flower sets. It was the non-bright spot on the wall and had a rough feel to it.
As we continued walking to find the next place for the flowers, a couple girls saw our bouquet and asked where we got the flowers. After telling them to check out A Village of Flowers, we also mentioned we had left one just a little further down for anyone that finds it first. They got so excited about it and ran over to it! We could hear them playfully arguing about who gets to keep it.
That little moment gave me the confidence that this was a project worth doing. Seeing how happy they became about getting some free flowers made me realize that this was a good project, and there was nothing bad about placing flowers for people to pick up.
Isn't that strange that I was scared to do this? It definitely put me out of my comfort zone a bit, and I had a fear that people would scoff at the idea or think it was dumb. But really, what did that matter? I didn't even see most of the people that took the flowers, or any of the ones who didn't take it. And the people that didn't want them wouldn't take them anyways. It's interesting how fun, good things can be scary at first. You just have to power through it! And bring a good friend like Amanda along to encourage you and make it all the more fun.
