Food For Thought

I've been trying to teach my daughter that she can touch a flower gently but shouldn't pick it. A colony of bees have created a home in our front yard, underground among the flowers. My daughter and I observe the holes and mounds of freshly excavated dirt daily as the bees buzz around us. She calls them "Happbees" and listens as I tell her the flowers are food for the bees. She stares in concentration as I tell her the story about flowers and nectar and pollen and bees.

Thinking she finally understood me and the importance of flowers, I stood back yesterday as she bent to examine another flower. As fast as a bee darts in and out of a flower, my daughter picked the flower's petals. She turned to grin at me before she began to sprinkle crushed petals on top of all of the bee holes.

Ayla understood me after all, flowers do provide bees with nourishment; I just didn't imagine she would actually try to feed the bees!

This experience has given me a lot of "food for thought" as a writer-mama. Are there taboos or hands-off limits I place on my writing? Do I avoid certain topics or experiences in my writing only to indirectly feed them in another way?

Who do the bees and the flowers represent in my writing?

If the flowers represent details, secrets, or past events of people's lives that I know and the bees are my readers, then I would be harming the individuals if I shared their secrets by writing about them and possibly not benefit the readers as well.

Perhaps the flowers stand for my free creative writing that feeds the bees, my self-confidence as a writer. If I pick, chew up, and scatter the petals of my writing by over-analyzing, over-critiquing, then the bees are denied their food and my opinion of my writing diminishes.

Or maybe the flowers are simply flowers and the bees are just bees, and the only thing I can do to give justice to both is to simply write about the nature of flowers and bees.