It might be said, in retrospect, that this will have been a very peculiar blog post. I can’t disagree. It all started when I found a wayward sweet potato that had started in a normal position on my kitchen counter but somehow in the disarray that regularly ensues in said kitchen the sweet potato ambled down the counter and behind things so that when I found it — you’ve no idea how embarrassed I am to admit this — it had started sprouting arms and legs with a leaf on top. I popped off everything but the wee leaf — mind, I have no training, experience, or knowledge about what to do with a sweet potato when it begins to take on new life forms but I was told that if it were spring I could put it in water and let it sprout and it would grow a beautiful plant that would last all the way into fall.

This isn’t spring, we’re just a few days short of it being officially fall, but I am firm in my conviction that you can love things into growing indoors if you treat them kindly and with respect and be open and willing to learn from them. My sweet potato is now in a perfectly fitted container of water up to about an inch and a half down from the little leaf, and I have been conversing with it this morning while making my coffee and asking it to sprout itself like mad so I could plant it and learn from it through the winter. Please do not try to discourage me. I once had a cut Christmas tree that I brought to life and it even grew new baby pine cones. I had the tree a full year. I believe in miracles.

The journey of the sweet potato is akin to what I am doing with Pastiche. I started my little publication on a wing and a prayer and knew that it would teach me what I needed to learn along the way. What it is teaching me is that it is so much more than I first imagined it would be. It is teaching me that it is sprouting wings and becoming a community, a family, that it will be offering ecourses and paintings for sale to help me survive, but mostly it will become a beacon of love and light to the many who need it. It has sprouted a leaf and I have put it in a jar of water so that I can coax it into becoming a beautiful plant of many colors, beautiful energy, and lovely lights. And I am fully expecting my sweet potato to do the same.

There is a funny Shoebox card where the mother sweet potato is angrily shouting at her young spudling and she is telling him he is not being a real sweet potato, to which he of course answers, “Yes I yam.” I think everything has the ability to be so much more than we have been told it might be. When I brought my little Charlie Brown Christmas tree home, cut and sadly hidden in the back of the lot because it was little and misshapen, I immediately started putting Miracle Gro in the water which I was told NOT to do. I did it anyway. By February soft, green little pine cones were covering the “cut=dead” tree. I moved it out on my patio and planted it in a huge pot of dirt and kept it watered and fed. It kept producing baby pine cones until the weather started getting really warm. By the time the tree was really dead I had filled the pot with morning glory seeds and before long the branches of the now dead tree were filled with vines and then morning glories of every color. It bloomed until November when it was time to get the next tree. At this point I dragged it into the woods to be a home for the little wildlings. I had it for 1 year and while it wasn’t alive the whole time it had a LIFE. And I loved it.

My sweet potato may not grow as I’d like it to but it is going to be given every chance and I just love it all to pieces. I will bake other sweet potatoes for the pugs and I but this one will be given a chance to be more than it is expected to be. I think we should view all of life like this.

This is a short post but my sweet potato deserved a little celebratory story while it is in there trying it’s best. I believe in my sweet potato. I believe in Pastiche. I believe in life and all of the glories it holds. I believe in you and I believe in me. Let’s be yams and grow like the dickens! Are you with me?

I love you madly too, truly, madly, deeply. It’s time that you love you like that too.