I took a flower arranging workshop over the weekend with the brilliant and mighty folks at Beet & Yarrow down Baker way in Denver. When I say brilliant…Corrine is so good at what she does it is kind of scary. She’s an incredible designer and an excellent teacher.

I’m really glad I did it and I think you should try it too. Yes, you, specifically.

It was fun and relaxing and I learned stuff. All of my previous attempts at flower arranging have been pretty frustrating and now I know why. I’d look up a YouTube video and follow along. Everything ended up stuffy and suffocated. It wasn’t fun. I was never able to achieve the naturalistic flow we are always searching for in, well, everything.

During the course I heard a thing that made me realize I had probably seen content rooted in traditional French floral arranging – “the ice cream cone style.” That clicked and the previous disconnect made sense.

My wonderful and talented partner has worked in fine dining kitchens. They’ve told me stories about fussy chefs torturing employees to emulate stilted French kitchen traditions. As far as I can tell that mostly centers around abuse – cycles of degradation, screaming, and pushing yourself and everyone else to the limit in pursuit of ill-conceived and ill-defined perfectionism. Tortured artist bullshit. I’m too old for that. I’ve also done enough therapy to see it for what it is: debilitating self-doubt and chronic low self-esteem projected onto any poor bastard unlucky enough to be lower in the pecking order.

That doesn’t result in great art in any sustainable way. Pushing yourself is natural to some extent. But in order to make anything of beauty (without giving yourself a stroke) the push has to come from fuel in the tank, not the cracking of a whip.

The point is, don’t be a tortured artist. Don’t push yourself to the brink. Don’t force perfection. Whatever you’re doing will look worse and no one, including yourself, will like working with you. Be like Corinne – try to find what the universe is doing right here, right now…and go with it. If you can. Or at least take a step back, breathe, and be part of it unfolding.

And take a flower arranging class at Beet & Yarrow in Denver. Buy some flowers from them. It will make your life more beautiful. It will make you a better artist. Those things go together, ya know.