The Word Garden began in seed form when Sam, a woman with a gift for recognizing what someone would be good at, asked me this question, "Have you ever thought about writing children's books?"

Up to that point, I had not, but it started my wheels spinning. In September of that year I wrote the following in my journal: "I am thinking of writing a children’s book on the theme of seeds and words and the development of identity." Without a plan, however, dreams don't materialize, so my dream was forgotten for many years.

The next piece of the puzzle came in May of 2007 when a dear lady, Ruth, who knew that I was looking for a new purpose in my life, suggested painting. It didn't seem to be a logical solution at the time, because I hadn't painted in thirty years. However, I kept it in mind.

Then five months later, I pulled out my old journals and noticed my entry on the theme of the children's book. A couple of weeks after that, while vacuuming, the title "The Word Garden" spontaneously came to mind and that is when it all came together — I knew that this was my new purpose.

I wrote the first version as a story where, in a garden, a little boy is being taught the lesson of how to use words by his grandfather. I didn't know that an upcoming trip to the Tri Cities area of Washington was going to play a huge part in shaping my little book. I was staying with my friends, Beki and Bill, while attending a conference there, and I shared what had been going on with me, even reading to Beki what I had written so far. I didn't know that she was an avid
children's book lover, so her input was quite valuable and she suggested writing it as a poem. I didn't like the suggestion at first, because it sounded too hard for someone who had only written two poems in the last thirty years. My naïve thoughts about this project being easy were being challenged already — but I knew she was right.

Upon returning home, I quickly converted the story into a poem and my son, Ben, helped me with the initial editing.

Ruth's encouragement about painting gave me the courage to attempt painting the illustrations myself. So, with no instructions on how to create scenes and develop characters, I pulled out some very old magazines with country scenes and used them for loose reference, creating the first setting for the book.

A problem arose when I realized that I had no clue how to paint a willow tree! It created such a dilemma for me that I wanted to delete it from the poem. I painted a series of horrible versions, with failure after failure. Then I finally got my first workable willow, which I hoped would be my last!

My next obstacle was to create a setting for the text, "eager to learn how to study and play." Once again I tried to make it easy, but it didn't work. The bunnies were lost in a huge grassy field and the scene was painfully uninteresting. At this point I learned to embrace difficulty as the friend of the creative process. I needed to make it hard on myself if I wanted the scenes to be visually appealing. There would be no escaping painting many trees, especially willows, if I wanted the pictures to work.

Actually, I had never painted animals either, so this was another challenge to my painting skills. I ended up looking at hundreds of pictures of rabbits in hopes of capturing their anatomy correctly. I then spent additional months refining them, even after the book was done.

Beyond the skill challenges, were the difficulties of communicating my abstract thoughts with still pictures. This is when I was grateful to know that Edison had to push through thousands of failures to create the light bulb. And in the end, even my failures greatly contributed to the final images.

The central picture, "The heart is the soil," proved to be the hardest to communicate visually. It took seven failed attempts before the "light" went on in my head and I saw the pea plant in my mind. This gave me the understanding that I had to paint what goes on in the heart, from below the surface.

I could go through each of the hurdles, but the ultimate lesson was just to keep "pushing into the blank page," and as I did the images began to take shape. Somehow I began to intuitively feel when it was working, and I found that just facing these challenges and moving into them was an invitation into the creative world. The pain of stretching out of my comfort zone finally brought me the freedom to experience a whole new world — the world of creating a picture book — and in the process I grew.