On BPM & 4/4 Time in Dahlia Breeding

It’s the first Saturday of June, all the tubers have been tucked in their new home, while I wait for them to emerge. There are seedlings and cuttings awaiting to be planted, and with the generosity of rain & cooler weather, I can get a move on this next task. There are walkways to be mowed, creeping buttercup to try to annihilate, and raised beds lay in their boxes anticipating these hands to construct them. With the amount of third and fourth year seedling tubers I have this year, my 40×100 garden space is wrung dry (hence needing to build some raised beds).

This work of dahlia hybridizing is a continued numbers game with eliminating those which don’t meet the standard and leaving enough room for first year seedlings to begin the journey. And still, all of these tasks to keep prodding forward is the looming dread of building, acquiring enough seedlings to keep this machine running. There is a gnawing inside which says, “you need to keep producing.” Yet, it’s not simply producing, but producing in quantity.

If I am not listening and moving to the beat of my own drum, I fall prey to a subtle voice circulating in the dahlia breeding world (which is so perfectly visible in our social media world). What does this voice communicate? It shows the 1000s to 10,000s of first year seedlings people are planting and beginning to interpret this as the norm, or the pinnacle of arrival. Sure, most of breeding boils down to a numbers game, more seedlings I plant the better the odds of getting something beautiful in return.

However, there is also a danger in the assumption that more equals better, or amassing enormous quantities is equivalent to success. I, for one, have been invited to continue to listen to my own internal gut & compass. I am invited to ignore, and even fight against the winds of the dahlia gods, so I am not lead adrift, floating at sea with too little seedlings to account while waiting for the birds to envelope my decaying carcass. If I am looking at this for the long haul, then I have learned much of life is a marathon, and sprinting out, burning energy is not how to keep the pace.

So what matters is knowing the beat of my own drum. The melody of my life’s journey could be in 4/4 time, but depending on the season, the BPM is adjusted; hence, keeping in cadence with my step & my families’. Some seasons, I’ve adjusted the BPM to 150 (Go-Go’s We Got the Beat), while in my current season I’ve adjusted the BPM to 60 (Radiohead’s Creep). I haven’t stopped playing, simply slowed the tempo, matched my steps to the beat my drum needs to beat and stopped allowing foreign beats to detour me.

I invite you to find your timing, and allow yourself to adjust the BPM to match that of your season. Not only that, but to give yourself grace to slow it down to 60 BPM if needed. In addition, to note some people can consistently dance to a 150 BPM year after year, and that’s great for them. It’s not about judgement, it’s about knowing seasons and our own rhythm we need to either dance to or gently sway alongside. The point is to keep moving however slow or fast it may be.