I remember a life when I could simply paint flowers upon the earth with a thought, a gesture, a will. Perhaps this is what it was to be Eve tending the garden of Eden.
But that is not this life.
In this life, I can paint and I can garden, but both are much more difficult and labor intensive than a simple thought, a gesture, a will.
My thoughts are not transferred seamlessly from mind to earth or even from mind to paper, but require time, effort, and — god forbid! — skill. And the development of skill requires yet more time and effort, but worse: it must be consistent. To draw a flower once is not so odious, but to do it well you have to do it a hundred times or more, and even then you have not created a flower but merely a picture thereof. Ceci n’est pas une fleur.
I (some other “I”) used to be able to paint in flowers. Now I can barely paint flowers. I mean… I’m not a bad painter, when I try, but to try necessitates believing in the possibility of a worthwhile outcome — and sometimes I do! Sometimes I do paint and draw simply to honor the beauty of God’s creation, or to make myself sit and study the thing itself closely and carefully. These motives overlap.
But more often, the knowledge that no matter how good I could get at painting flowers they would never truly be flowers ultimately pulls the brush from my hand and ushers me out of the Imaginarium and into the garden and the greenhouse. I built a greenhouse to try to paint in flowers again, but really I am merely painting with God’s flowers. It’s more like collage.
And I think this is also why, over the years, my art has become less and less about painting and more and more about collage. I could have spent the years developing my skills in drawing and painting, but instead I have spent them lamenting the impossibility of simply willing flowers into being. I feel hopelessly incapable of making better, truer flowers than God, so I use images of flowers in prints of captured light, and clumsily cut and glue them into impossible arrangements and unlikely assemblages. At least the arrangements are my own, if any creation of “man, sub-creator, the refracted light / through whom is splintered from a single white / to many hues and endlessly combined / in living shapes that move from mind to mind” can be said to be one’s own.
The heart of Man is not compound of lies,
“Mythopoeia,” J.R.R. Tolkien
but draws some wisdom from the only Wise,
and still recalls him. Though now long estranged,
Man is not wholly lost nor wholly changed.
Dis-graced he may be, yet is not dethroned,
and keeps the rags of lordship once he owned,
his world-dominion by creative act:
not his to worship the great Artefact,
Man, Sub-creator, the refracted light
through whom is splintered from a single White
to many hues, and endlessly combined
in living shapes that move from mind to mind.
Though all the crannies of the world we filled
with Elves and Goblins, though we dared to build
Gods and their houses out of dark and light,
and sowed the seed of dragons, ’twas our right
(used or misused). The right has not decayed.
We make still by the law in which we’re made.
My alyssum is blooming in the greenhouse, and I am immeasurably proud to have been the hands that worked to make it so, and yet secretly — ashamed? — that the blooming of the flowers is not truly the work of my own hands, but of God’s. I may have filled the pots with soil, sure; and filled the soil with seeds, yes; and built a house of light for them to grow, and tended them with water and with scissors and with love (is this third ingredient even necessary?)…
But I did not make the seeds. I did not make the soil. I did not make the water. I did not even make the money to buy the seeds or the soil or the water. Rather, I spend my days tending the one little rosebud that I can almost say I grew myself — a labor of love which pays not a penny but which yields the most beautiful harvest of all — and my beloved husband, as my little rosebud says, “work, money, buy blueberries” (or as the case may be, “work, money, buy seeds and soil so your wife can play God in the garden”).
In fact, it’s funny (or maybe sad) to think that all I’m really doing in the greenhouse is trying to help course-correct from the plumbed and paved path my people have driven this intoxicated planet down back toward something more closely resembling what I can only guess God’s plan for it was.
Blessed are the men of Noah’s race, that build
“Mythopoeia,” J.R.R. Tolkien
Their little arks, though frail and poorly filled,
And steer through winds contrary towards a wraith,
A rumor of a harbor guessed by faith.
I’m guessing at a harbor with more flowers and fewer lawns, but one ark can only do so much so quickly, and I confess I’m not always proud of my methods.
And am I even right about this? The God of the Bermuda Grass seems very powerful. Maybe he does want the lawns to win. Maybe I am a willful, disobedient child coloring on the walls with flowers instead of crayons, planting them not where they belong by God’s will but where I want them. Well, I mean — of course I’m planting them where I want them.
You know, maybe God’s will isn’t so particular about where each grass and flower grows. Maybe his whole game is filling my head with visions of flowers so that I will plant my own feet in the garden, right where he put them when he told me not to go eating apples before I ran off and did exactly that.
Until we meet again – be well, seek beauty, and leave a little magic wherever you go.
Blessings,
Leave a Reply