Day 5 – Create & Guard Your Secret Garden

So yes, I followed Mme. Ferris’s Day 4 tip and went with a more polished, complete eye makeup look. I have to say, it was actually sort of fun to go through my cosmetics and sharpen pencils and clean brushes and experiment with shadows and blending. I even made two breaks in my workday to do touch-ups, which is one of those things that I always say I’ll do, but I very rarely actually follow through with doing. While I’m not at all sure that I’m going to spend ten minutes every day applying eye makeup, I have to admit that I enjoyed it as a change of pace.

28e4c4fe67a1730dced7c0c46a22b919-journal-entries-journal-promptsFor Day 5, Mme. Ferris wants us to “create and guard your secret garden.” This ties in very nicely with the earlier idea of cultivating mystique – follow me, here. The “secret garden” she’s talking about could be an actual garden, but it could also be a bookshelf of favorite books that spark your imagination, or a craft closet that lights your creative fires, or a small notepad that you carry in your purse to jot down quotes and ideas as they occur to you. Your secret garden might just be a headspace where you let your dreams and fancies take flight. Mme. Ferris points out that, especially at the beginning of a project, it can be incredibly valuable to have a secret garden to allow the ideas to take root and grow. Not everyone is going to “get” you and often, even well-meaning friends can toss off criticisms that kill many a good idea in the cradle. Don’t give them the chance. Whether the idea that has caught your fancy is to learn French or watch all of Kurosawa’s movies or go low-carb or start a crafting blog – whatever it is, use your secret garden, your happy place, your own retreat to give the idea room to take root and flourish. We don’t have to share everything.

I think this is an excellent idea. Virginia Woolf understood the importance of having a room of one’s own to create and we all could benefit from having a secret garden, whether it’s an actual green space, or a shelf, or a notebook, or just the space behind our eyes. This has given me a couple of ideas – stop by tomorrow and see how I did as well as checking to see what Mme. Ferris has lined up for us next!


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