Cultivating Creative Community
So far, I’d only added dirt, bone meal, and periodic water, then parked the cans in a sunny spot to see what happened. Yet thanks to this minimal work, green shoots were already seeking the sun, requiring me to add almost daily scoops of more dirt to cover the rapidly growing stems. Water plus dirt made mud in most other settings, but here were these plants, charting almost miraculous growth despite so little work on my part.
Maybe I grew like that too.
This is a lonely posture, but letting people in can hurt, bruise, bewilder. Looking into another's eyes and seeing myself there means encountering not just that person and their messes, but my own. It means I have to stare my own presence down and feel that pinch in my chest, that thickness in my throat. I have to face the former me because someone knew me then, knows me now, and if we both stick around, will know me in the future. That is love, and it is tricky.
To know someone else, to love someone else, is to lose myself a little.
And then, for the first (of many) profoundly healing moments of the weekend, I realized that I was temporarily untethered. But not untethered in the Sandra-Bullock-out-in-space sort of way. Instead of feeling distress or loneliness, I felt an unfamiliar sensation that it was just me here. I remembered that I exist. Not only that, but I felt relieved and surrounded by the acceptance of God. Nobody calling. Nobody for me to check on or take care of. No Twitter feed. No e-mails waiting with exclamation points.But Summer Lake offers me something neither of those places ever can — the expanse of wilderness. Every day we surround ourselves with manmade structures and agendas and priorities set by us, the human beings. When you venture into those wetlands you are reminded again that an entire world happens out there without you, every day, every season of the year. Staggering, beautiful, abundant life. The peace of wild things.
My involvement is about being the guy behind the thing that says, “Pay attention to this.”
If I can be the person that directs others to a special thing, I’m perfectly fine and I like that anonymity. That’s my own job well done.
Sabbath-keeping is a sturdy axis when the storms of life threaten spring’s hope. The choice of rest when responsibilities pile up seems counterintuitive, yet carving out routine time periods with the Creator provides a steady center while life continues spinning.
It is when we cannot control outcomes that the depth and breath of trust becomes revelation.
It was in rereading the poems, though, that the poetry got left behind. I started reading these poems as prayers. And not prayers of the animals, but prayers for myself. These are prayers I would never know how to say, for the creature-like movements inside of me are intrinsically inarticulate. These poems are prayers for the animals inside of us — the heavy, slow, frightful, instinctive — those parts of us that fly and plod and bury down.
When I saw my garden plot I was surprised at the way it seemed both small and large.
I got to spot the blossom first. Judy first spotted the cluster of green cherry tomatoes, and texted me a photo. I look forward to watching their reddening, and to the day of harvest, to that first burst of pure sunlight in my mouth. But the yield is not high in my goals. Neither, any more, is the work of emptying my mind and dirtying my fingernails.
My primary goal in sharing this garden is to yield to the Overseer’s soul amendments.
My experience has been that I mistake seasons of “creative dryness” for a season in which it is time to make something else. So, rather than simply waiting for the next moment of inspiration or the next deadline to move you into creative work, move yourself out of your normal discipline and do some painting, drawing, shooting, playing, etc. After all, you are a creature who creates — that is the core of who you are. What you make is secondary.
With all of this in our hearts, we got in the car and left the hotel, returning home to what we love. Before long, the acute stages of family emergency had passed and everyone moved on to more permanent situations. As things returned to a more normal state, I found myself feeling more placed than ever, letting go of questions about the future and digging in to life as I know it right now.
Whether you believe you have a soul, a personality, or that you are a random blip in a succession of universes, within your person is the very you of you. I’m describing the you that is only you and no one else on the planet. You know you’re not me or your sister or brother. You are you. You have a mind and emotions that feel, think, and imagine. You have a body that has mobility and senses. You have a gender. You’re able to communicate in a number of ways — non-verbally through expressions, with language, with your whole body, and of course with music. Creativity, and specifically songwriting, ought to be the natural outworking of the whole person simply being what he or she is, human.
In that first class all I could think about were Madonna’s biceps. It was the late 1990s, and Madonna had recently become as famous for her toned physique (attributed to her recent interest in yoga) as for her music. As I looked at myself in the mirror of the studio, awkwardly trying to follow the instructor’s gentle guidelines, I wondered if Madge’s muscle tone would be a happy by-product of my journey into health. “Bring your attention to the breath,” the instructor said, while gently lifting my hips, which were already trembling from exertion. Madonna, her biceps, and my own body scampered away from my attention, as I shifted that attention to my breath. Inhale. Exhale. Inhale. Exhale. On my way home on the subway, faced with the mild anxiety that always seemed to accompany me into cramped spaces, I tried to do the same. Inhale. Exhale. Inhale.
It all seemed almost like my own, that was true. But as early romance gave way to marriage, I realized that it is one thing to be from somewhere, to know it by heart, and another to adopt a place or have it chosen for you. My marriage chose Atlanta for me, and I was then adopted by my husband’s many circles of friends. Yet until our last year or so there, though, I had an indistinct feeling of being on the outside looking in — someone who belonged more by association than creed.
Before, I’d wanted to be a fireman
and then an electrician
who climbed poles in snowstorms
and, for a spell, an architect.
But I knew the next morning
that it would be something else.
By sheer will, I managed to remain horizontal, feet obediently planted firmly on the wall of rock. While gaining a small victory over the battle waging within, I remembered the young girl who was dangling on a rope beside me. Surely, she must be terrified. To be helpless, at the mercy of another, and to be unable to see seemed unimaginable. She was completely vulnerable.
Yet she was smiling. And laughing.
I glanced behind me and ached for the desert — a landscape in which things and maybe people, too, thrust deeper roots into the rocky earth in order to survive. It is a land teeming with earth-toned life, as though wildness found just enough water to scratch color onto the earth’s skin only to have the sun bleach it out again. Struggle is its tradition, baked under the scorching sun in a massive sky, seasoned with diverse cultures in providential collision. The history of the land unfurls into the present like the deep fuchsia blossoms of a White Sands cactus. I didn’t like this arid landscape much until after I left.
Pulling a notepad out of your pocket
bent with sitting, grimy and dog-eared
your pencil at the ready, you tumbled
like a bear out of the cab, writing as you ran
Toward the lamb just being born
toward the godly miracle of it, toward the sun
When we tell our struggle and pain and joy and even what makes us laugh, we know more deeply who we are. And we know more deeply who each other is. We all need listeners, intellectual stretchers, confidants, energetic people, angels, spiritual guides, and helpers in our lives. Because we need belonging. It is difficult to create an environment of belonging for a child if you don’t feel like you belong anywhere. So find someone who listens, and tell your story. Let yourself be known. Once you have a powerful sense of belonging, you can’t help but begin to create that wherever you are.
Once a week they arrive at our church. We sit them down at a table with us, one by one, our guests, longing to be Jesus to them, to assist in the miracles of change by the power of His Spirit. Their poverty is immediate and unmediated. We are eye to eye, hand to hand with them. There is no mistaking the grime on the skin, the stink of the unwashed, the flush of fever, the glazed eyes of the whacked out. This is no abstraction, no theoretical sociological condition. They are marked indelibly by their deprivation. They want a life for themselves and for their children, but where can it be? The sense of the impossible overwhelms them.
I value the domestic arts. I believe in the importance of beauty, whether that beauty is in the form of a poem or a child’s first birthday cake. Yet, I have recently arrived at a place where the things I have learned, the skills I have practiced, and the supplies I have hoarded in kitchen cabinets and over-stuffed drawers are no longer helping me to create this precious thing called hospitality.
