I never intended to plant a flower garden. Vegetables seemed like more than enough, especially while the raised beds and the picket fence remained only a sketch on a bit of torn graph paper. But I was tempted by those antique roses in a catalog. They were separated from the tomato seeds by only a few pages. I did not seek them out. You might even say they came to me.
Next to come were a few seed packets of zinnias, cosmos, sunflowers, and marigolds. When I ordered them, I thought of annual flowers only as an extension of the vegetable garden. They would attract pollinators. They would deter unwelcome insects. Tucked in and around the vegetables, they would help me to grow more food.
But then, in late spring, my sister came for a visit. In the evenings, we flipped through my gardening books, and she told me about everything she had grown, or tried to grow, in her North Carolina yard. She told me, especially, about dahlias. “Dahlias!” she swooned. “So easy! So beautiful!”
Apparently, if given all summer to grow, dahlias will start flowering just when the zinnias and marigolds begin to grow tired. If I didn’t plant dahlias this spring I would have to wait a whole year to try again. Not exactly now or never, but it felt close enough. I ordered eight dahlia tubers through the mail. I had no idea where I would put them.
This is sometimes how a work of art begins. Through accident and contingency. A whispered encouragement. A spur-of-the-moment decision.
The dahlia tubers arrived toward the end of May. They looked like old, pale sweet potatoes. I laid them out on the grass, and then I began bringing up from the basement all of the flower seedlings I had not managed to squeeze into the vegetable beds; this was, truthfully, most of the flowers I had grown. I am not sure where I thought they would go when I started so many seeds back in March.
I first thought of planting everything in the circular flowerbed.
They could fill in the empty space where I still had not replaced the fountain. But I worried that six-foot-tall dahlias, zinnias, and cosmos in that spot where the driveway branches might make it even harder for visitors to find their way to our front door.
As it is, our looping driveway confuses those making their first visit. I try to keep the porch near the front door clear of toys and muddy shoes, but, too often, I hear a knock on the back door, which opens into the rear of the front hall. Most of our first-time guests shuffle their way into the house between a pile of discarded rain boots and an awkwardly placed radiator. Jonathan and I are thinking about planting a little wooden arrow into the ground of the circular flowerbed. It would point toward the right and, we hope, lead visitors to the front door on the western side of the house.
Though it is a looping circle, in my mind the driveway points in only one direction. It points toward home. Always. It will forever be my road back. My way of return. But sometimes I flip through the pages of our guest book, and all the names and all the scribbled notes we have gathered in this first year remind me that Maplehurst also sits at a crossroads. For some, this hilltop is a place to pause on their journey. A place to rest along the way. For others, the circular drive is a road for setting forth. It is the point from which to begin again.
But I want Maplehurst to be more than a place for rest and reorientation. And I want it to be more than my home. More than simply a gift given to me. I bear the image of the great Creator, and I want Maplehurst to be my creation. My work of art. My offering.
Where does art come from? Like so many of the very best things in this world, its roots spread through emptiness and brokenness.
Art begins when someone recognizes that things are not as they should be. Our art is born in the ache between death and resurrection, and we make art in the empty hours between Friday and Sunday. Whether we speak of poems or paintings or places, all art acknowledges an absence and dreams of something other, something more. Art is the material form of hope. Art is also an argument. A method of persuasion. I want Maplehurst to embody welcome, but I hope it can also be a challenge.
For those grown accustomed to hurry and stress, Maplehurst will shout, There is another way to live! For those who have forgotten that the earth is their home, Maplehurst will whisper, This is where you belong. For those who feel lost, I hope this house reminds them that all of life is a journey of return.
Jonathan and I cannot force these messages, but we can cultivate them the way I cultivate the garden. And we can let them slip through our fingers like water, pour from our hearts like a fountain, and pray that they echo even in the noisy day-to-day reality of family life.
Ours is a waiting world. But what will we grow in the emptiness?
What will we cultivate with the moments and resources given to us? I want to grow a living hope. Something as vivid and as alive as a bed of flowers. I want to create something that shows the way. A signpost of the good things God has planned for us and our world. Like an arrow planted in the very place where we anticipate a fountain.
Yesterday I filled an ironstone pitcher with cosmos, zinnias, and marigolds. The cosmos and marigolds are white. The zinnias are Benary’s Giant in salmon rose. Today I can see a fine dusting of pollen on my kitchen counter. There also seems to be pollen in the fruit bowl. But I suppose the art I am most interested in creating has more to do with enchantment than perfection. It is candlelight, rather than clean floors. A table that spills over with good food, rather than just-scrubbed countertops.
Today I am on my knees deadheading marigolds. The cosmos are waving their lacy green fingers over my sunhat and spraying my shoulders with dew. The heavy heads of the zinnias are nodding, nodding, nodding, like buoys lifting and dropping on waves. I know that it is only a flowerbed, but it feels, for a moment, like the sea.
Since the beginning, God’s spirit has hovered over the waters.
But sometimes, I am there too. Then I hear the hymn of creation and know that the threefold voice has never stopped singing.
And I join in.
Editor Laura Turner sat down with Christie Purifoy to talk more about art and formation. You’re invited to that conversation.
Laura Turner: You say, “Art is an argument.” What do you mean by that?
Christie Purifoy: To create art, we fill or transform an emptiness. We pour our poem onto a blank page, or we cultivate a f lower garden in bare or weedy soil. What we may not realize is that this sort of transformative act embodies a message. Of course, depending on our point of view and the particular claims of our creations, our art might embody many messages, some of them contradictory. However, the primary argument put forward by all art is this: emptiness is not the end. Death is not the end. Ultimately, art is an argument for resurrection. Wendell Berry says, “practice resurrection.” Creating art is one way to do exactly that.
LT: How does the practice of gardening affect your spiritual life?
CP: My gardening life and my spiritual life are thoroughly intertwined, but not perhaps in the expected ways. My garden often feels like more of a spiritual battleground than a sanctuary. When I am in my garden, I can never quite forget the “valley of the shadow of death,” and even on a beautiful summer day, I sometimes want only to pull down the blinds, open up a book, and forget that the tomatoes are overripe, and the roses are being devoured by Japanese beetles.
Except for one brief, glorious window of time in mid-June, my first response on stepping through my garden gate is usually anxiety. I feel overwhelmed by weeds, by zucchini grown to the size of baseball bats, and by dahlias nibbled to shreds by the rabbits. I worry when it hasn’t rained, and I worry when it rains too much. Even at its most beautiful, my garden teeters on the edge of chaos and decay.
If the garden rarely fills me with an automatic sense of peace, it does force me to practice release. Yes, we walk through the valley of the shadow, but a good shepherd walks with us. In the garden, I practice releasing the beetles, the rabbits, and the weeds just as, within my home, I practice releasing my fears for my children or my worries over money. If I find peace in my garden, it is always the peace “which passeth all understanding,” a peace that is more enduring than whatever circumstances I find myself in.
LT: Is hospitality a spiritual practice for you?
CP: It is! Very little about hospitality feels natural for me. I am an overly sensitive, introverted, somewhat anxious person, and hiding away with a book is almost always my first instinct. Hospitality is hard, and in many ways, I feel ill-suited for it, and yet it has been and continues to be one of the primary instruments of blessing in my life and home. At the risk of introducing a theological tangle, I will even claim that breaking bread with others in my home seems to share some of the sacramental qualities of the Lord’s Supper practiced by the church.
Hospitality doesn’t always feel spiritual. Sometimes it feels fun, and often it feels like a hassle, but it is one of the foremost ways I practice losing my life (Matthew 16:25). The spiritual irony is, of course, that I have found my life by embracing interruption, welcoming the stranger, and giving away (house, food, time) the gifts I have received. I should also say that motherhood and hospitality have a great deal in common. In my own life, I can’t quite untangle the two. Every one of my babies have been strangers to me at birth, and they are the ones I serve in love on a daily basis (when I’m not hiding in my bedroom with a book, that is!).
LT: “I want to grow a living hope,” you write. How do you cultivate hope?
CP: The cultivation of hope is another way of describing the “practice” of resurrection. First Peter 1:3 tells us that as followers of a risen Christ we are born again into a living hope. Our hope resides, quite literally, in the one who is the firstborn from among the dead.
I cultivate hope in small, ordinary ways; for instance, when I plant daffodil bulbs each autumn or impossibly small trees each spring. Even these small acts can feel risky. The bulbs might rot; the trees might have their bark stripped by those same pesky rabbits. And yet, when the daffodils do bloom and the apple trees do bear fruit, it feels miraculous. Believing in the potential of a buried bulb or seed conditions my soul to believe for even more impossible things. This year, someone much loved in my family died unexpectedly. It can feel at times as if we will never be reunited, but the evidence of my garden convinces me otherwise.
Of course, we cultivate hope in much larger (and riskier) ways, too. We birth children, we foster, and we adopt, we reach out to our neighbors, we give away our time and our money; in these and in so many other ways, we live resurrection. Resurrection isn’t only something we wait for. It is also something we live whenever we act in a way that proclaims death is not the end and we have nothing to fear. When the hope of Christ is alive in and around us, we become fearless.
Christie Purifoy has taught literature and composition to under-graduates at the University of Chicago, The School of the Art Institute Chicago, and the University of North Florida. In 2012, Christie traded the university classroom for a large vegetable garden and a henhouse in southeastern Pennsylvania. She writes about the beauty, mystery, and wonder that lies within the ordinary at her blog, “There is a River,” www.christiepurifoy.com. Her book, Roots and Sky, released earlier this year.
Laura Turner is a writer and editor living in San Francisco, where she also works on the communication team at City Church. She has an MFA in creative nonfiction writing from Seattle Pacific University and writes regularly about the intersection of faith and culture. She is a regular contributor to Christianity Today’s Her.meneutics site, has a column at Religion News Service, and has written for publications such as The Atlantic, Pacific Standard, and Books & Culture. She has one husband, Zack, and one dog, R2D2.