Prompt & Ponder | Petrichor
The sign that parched ground is breaking open for something new in our creative growth.
Every so often, there is a paid post from our Prompt & Ponder creative community that I feel is particularly timely. And thus will open up a sneak peek of the writing and a prompt for everyone to explore. I am deeply grateful each one of you is here.
This word has been rolling around in my imagination all week.
Petrichor. The dance between drought and deluge.
The scent of the earth softening and breaking open with the first rains after a dry season.
The reminder: we too are earth waiting for rain.
Petrichor.
It’s a relatively new word, first coined in 1964 by two Australian researchers, Isabel Joy Bear and R.G. Thomas. The literal definition is “the blood of the stone.”
More commonly, it is used to describe the scent that rises from the earth in the first rain after a dry spell. That loamy, earthy smell of dry ground softening and drinking in the water it desperately needed.
But where does that scent come from? How does it work? Why is it there?
Yes, I was the child with a million questions. Not much has changed. There’s good reason why curiosity is a primary gateway into a practice of wonder.
So I did some old-fashioned digging this week. Pun completely intended.
Petrichor speaks to a return after absence, life stirring in stillness, the moment a parched place receives the relief it has been waiting for.
Protecting the Seeds
Plants release oils in dry periods that build up and coat the ground.
These oils slow down or stop the growth of seeds underground, thus protecting them from germinating too soon and having to attempt growing in the middle of a drought or adverse conditions.
The oils protect the seeds by keeping them dormant until the rains come.1
When the first rains fall, the water drops interact with the oils on the ground and another compound in the soil called geosmin to aerosolize a mixture of these both into what we then smell as petrichor. MIT scientists caught this action live on camera. You can watch it here.
Humans are so sensitive to geosmin we can recognize it in as little as 5 parts/trillion.2 It’s the loamy smell of gardening after rain.
The scent of earth recognizing earth.
Petrichor. It holds hope for drought and breakthrough, dormancy and becoming. The cycles that make us. The brave work of showing up in the dry and dark times of waiting.
The seasons when our imagination feels cracked bare and nothing is growing don’t mean we’ve failed or that our dreams are gone.
It just means some dreams are still seeds waiting for the rain.
What do dormant seeds do to survive dry seasons? They wait.
Not passively. Waiting creatively is an active kind of waiting.
A deliberate holding on to the dream, even in the face of challenges that would want to dismantle it. It is showing up for yourself because you are worthy of showing up for.
We, too, are earth waiting for rain.
What if creative flow is about being available, not productive? How might petrichor speak to the ebbs and flows in your creative journey?
