Rhizome thoughts

I know that this is not a new concept as I stole it from a conversation I was having.  I’ll kid myself that plagiarism is the finest form of flattery and not feel so guilty. 

I’ve been thinking about thinking again.  How do we take all of the thoughts that we have and make good use of them?  And I’ve been thinking about thinking in the garden, sitting on the swinging seat rocking gently backwards and forwards and watching the cabbage whites flutter between the flowers.  It has been such a lovely summer.

Are thoughts like flowers?  Should they grow up straight towards the sun like an iris on a single stem that produces a single yet beautiful bloom? An iris is like a linear thought that starts as a green shoot poking out of the soil and follows step after step until it reaches its zenith.

Should they be more like roses with a main branch that gives rise to a number of ideas all based on a similar theme? Such beautiful thoughts from a thorn bush.  Delicate thoughts protected by barbs until they have blossomed.

Or should they be more like dandelions with strong roots and colours that demand to be noticed?  Thoughts that are scattered across the lawn, taken for granted, treated as a nuisance and mown down only to reappear when your back is turned.

There are so many thoughts, those that blossom and others that wither, those that choke or climb or cover the ground, those that smell sweet and those that smell awful, those that are filled with colour and others that are quite plane.

But a lot of thinking is unseen.  It’s a background activity that goes on within the mind and only appears occasionally on a white board or a flip chart.  And these thought are like bulbs or corms and tubers that lie beneath the soil, filled with energy and potential ready to sprout and blossom when the conditions are right.

And then there are those single ideas that give rise to many different thoughts as if they are different plants shooting up from the same source.  To me these are the most exciting thoughts, variations on a theme, ideas that have grown from the garden of my mind.  They are rhizome thoughts.