Cultivating Creative Community
Each of us recites a poem. We talk about current events, and tell stories from our personal journeys. The sound of crickets is broken by the bell tolling for Compline. We realize we’ve lost track of time, so we rush Brother Paul back to the Abbey for the service.
Later, I will recall the blend of bread and wine and storytelling with prayer and the observing of silence. The rhythm of the afternoon, I think, might be a good model for the cadence of Antler’s work.
Once upon a time, a man and woman lived as caretakers in a garden ripe with mangoes and tomatoes and figs. I try to conjure up an image of cultivation without snails and squirrels and rabbits attacking my plants, without weeds demanding my constant attention, without the threat of too much water cracking my tomatoes and not enough withering the plant. Did Adam and Eve sing the fruit into bloom?
I can offer some of “my” time, maybe just my right arm’s worth. Or I can dive into something demanding and sacrificial, a place where I sense the Holy Spirit is leading. Jump in with both feet. But the whole dance? Impossible. I just really don’t know how to do that. I’m diffident by nature, and guarded. It’s unfamiliar, I’ve got no rhythm, and I look stupid. I am not a natural at this. I will lose my Self somehow, and my dignity along with it. Plus, I don’t even know exactly what I have to offer, or how to give it. What are the dance steps again?
We wanted to respond by making, not just critiquing or even experiencing. In fact, we spent our four-hour drive home that evening discussing work and beginning to outline several collaborative projects. We were intellectually and emotionally exhausted, yet enlivened for work (our various cups of coffee throughout the day helped, too). These paintings cause the viewer to take a life-giving, culture-making posture before she even realizes that she has begun to stand. This is the generative nature of good art/work.Abstract humanity has no draining friendships, annoying relatives, or untidy neighbors. We are never responsible for, or adversely affected by, humanity in the abstract. Facebook statuses, sound bites, and shots across the bow ought not be confused with the real and costly love that underwrites transformation. Bliss without righteousness is vacant, but righteousness without bliss is cruel.
The artistic work of a life, or the life of an artist, is about the doing of the work, the going of the work — the writing of this essay, the singing of this song. The audience, the outcome, the success or failure of that work cannot be a consideration in the making of it or we are doomed. Doomed to rely on formulas, to pander to the invisible critic in our heads.Art in all its forms is intimately connected with every aspect of all lives. We sing when people die. We dance when they get married. Even sports events and video games incorporate music, dance images, theater. The things I make are only my participation in that constant, unstoppable swirl of creation. This world is already beautiful and good. It’s just a question of where we choose to look.
I am learning to be more comfortable with uncertainty. I believe mercy hides everywhere in the world, waiting to swoop in and hold us. We cannot control much, but we can still live deep and meaningful lives. We can attend to the work of our hands and embrace our small yet worthy part in practicing resurrection. Remembering that we are forever beginners, never experts, at love.
Paris never slept, as I found to my pleasure when I returned at 21 and took up residence in a crummy hostel. Upland, in contrast, rarely seems to wake. But you can see the stars here like you never can in Paris, and the lonesome quiet of the prairie has started to feel like a companion. Maybe even a friend.The irony of conversing with a stranger is that your individual lives always look very different and personal, but then you strip away the nuances to find a common likeness buried inside of diversity. Take away money and geography and we’re all just flesh and blood and soul. We’re all dealing with sin and forgiveness, love and hate, glory and shame. The big ideas remain. Life creates another day of history and the babies keep on coming. People dream their dreams. The young grasp at reinventing the wheel and the maturing masses learn to let go of such reinventions one breath at a time.
On the day I was making stock, I was also taking stock. No doubt many of us do that this time of year, with the old year gone out the back door and the lock turned behind it, the new year just over the threshold, still slipping off its coat.
One way to consider and savor a year: Whom did I meet? What new friends did I collect and get collected by? What correspondents became a face and a voice and a delightfully embodied presence?
Despite my deep longing to be among the ranks of what I call the “true” artists, the kind who can effortlessly dress themselves in wonderfully whimsical, sophisticated clothing and decorate their homes with lovely abstract art that has deep roots in poetic allusion, I am really too poorly dressed and my home too pathetically decorated to ever count myself among their ranks.Too often when you reach the top of anything, a mountain or a career, you find yourself standing alone or with very few others. Attrition travels the length of the ascent. It may be that only the highly skilled and the very wounded make it to the top. The highly skilled arrive because they’re more prepared for success than anyone else in the world. The skilled-but-deeply-wounded arrive not because they’re so majestically prepared for success but because they cannot stop moving. Even the peak does not stop them. Space is their next frontier. Final frontier? Hardly.
For me, my recent visit to Laity Lodge was about opening my eyes to see that we are little children and everything we have is a gift. It was about opening my eyes to see that our heavenly Father is there. To see Him all around us — to see Him in places we may not have seen Him before — to see His love in everything that we have been given, in all the works of His hands.For its two-plus hours, it is wonderfully done: beautifully imagined, well acted, tenderly told, and when it was all over I was pleased. There is no way that the complexity and nuance of the novel could be captured in a film. So the director and the screenwriter are making choices, for good or not, about how to the tell the story in a way that is fair, but is at the same time their own work of art, too. I get that, and I honor that.
But there was a false note.
I study the stuff of my inheritance accidentally in every mirror and in every setting of the table, but I call them heirlooms because I inherit them from women I know and love. I cannot help but bear the silver hair of my grandmother, and by some indiscernible mix of nature and nurture, I love the game of bridge. Most likely, even in an open adoption, my non-biological children will not so easily see themselves growing into the people whose genetics made them. Spliced into us, they will stand to inherit much more — both the biological nature of their first family and the adopted nurture of their forever family — but through a sharp loss.
I want to tell you about my reality, about how boring and splintered it can be, how chaotic and bland, how unexpected and structured it is. In other words, I want to tell you about the ordinariness of my life and how that ordinariness doesn’t feel as beautiful as Wendell Berry makes it out to be.
That moment threw a quiet mantle of wonder over the rest of the season, tinging every act with a significance I had never known. A few days before Christmas I was up on a ladder wiring greenery onto a chandelier in anticipation of the loved ones that were soon coming, humming “Lo, How a Rose” under my breath (anything that had anything to do with roses seemed inherent with meaning that year), when suddenly I stepped down, clippers in hand, under the thrall of a singularly beautiful thought. I went straight to the phone, dialed the wholesale florist I use, and promptly ordered a huge box of blood-red roses.
Sorting the clothes on the floor of our bedroom, piling them into the hamper, measuring out the detergent and tossing the pieces one by one into our washing machine: this is how I know I’m home. The jerks and thumps of the washing machine, the pause just before the spin cycle, even the obnoxious beep of the dryer: these noises sound like home to me. Doing laundry means I am back in the place where my soul rests, the place where I can marshal my forces, and also lie down and sleep in peace.
In one weekend, we virtually erased it all. We peeled back all of the layers and tossed them away to start fresh. It was the right thing to do, but I couldn’t help feeling a little sad. For every renovation and remodel we do to this house, we erase some of its story. This house has been through a lot — more than even the previous owner knows — and when we change it, we take something away.
