No. 020: How to Walk through Walls.
On homeownership, art, and love.
The little house has four brick walls painted white; shutters a cheerful haint blue; a front porch with swing for watching sunsets; and hardwood floors in every room. It sits upon a shaded lawn at the end of a quiet, dead-end street—two deer just ambled through the yard!—and it’s exactly ten minutes from Trader Joe’s. It’s genuinely better than we asked for, better than we imagined; and as of three weeks ago, we get to call it ours.
The path we took to get here was neither short nor straightforward. After we wed a decade ago, we rented a furnished basement for a year, then a landlord-white apartment for a year, and then a house for seven years; and for the past year we lived with my parents while searching for this place of our own. Buying a house has always been a dream, but the timing was never right, until right now.
These past three weeks have been for me a window of most potent gratification. There have been few other seasons throughout my life during which so many of my material desires have met their fulfillment so tangibly and in such dense succession. My longing to own and cultivate a home was a fierce one, and the consequent satisfaction compels me to praise, to smile, to dance. It wakes me up early with a heart eager for the day ahead, and it energizes my hands to labor, that our life in this home should be a lovely one. Granted we’ve encountered a handful of hiccups and unpleasant surprises par the course for new homeowners in an older home, but I always expected we would, so none of these has clouded my halcyon spirit. To the contrary, I feel it as a privilege that we can now address such hiccups in our own way and in our own timing. My heart altogether beams.
I’ve noticed a curious phenomenon, however, concurrent with this rush of satisfaction: that is, my artistic inspiration has all but evaporated. My mental stream, which on any given day typically meanders between various ideas for word plays, articulations, prompts, and prints, now feels more like a muddy ditch. The desire to produce is still there, but when I look into my seed packet, I only see a few cracked shells.
I suppose this phenomenon is due in part to my current baseline of exhaustion: I’ve been working hard every day to paint rooms, assemble furniture, and unpack boxes, and by mid-afternoon my body feels spent. The mental load is heavy too—accounting for everything that needs to be done, then triaging the tasks into some semblance of a plan. Not every season can be an artistically fruitful one, and perhaps now is the time to let the fields rest while I devote my energy to other things.
But I do think there’s more to it than that, and of this I’m wary.
Artistic inspiration first and foremost requires an imagination. Maybe that sounds too obvious, but let me explain: The task of inspiration demands the artist to reach forward into the immaterial forms of goodness and beauty, then bring back with her some physical souvenir that has never before existed on earth. This, of course, is why we refer to artistic inspiration as creativity: before the product of art takes form, something else—a singular, newborn idea—has been created. Even photography, which many identify as the artistic medium most closely linked to reality, necessitates the imaginative manipulation of time, light, and perspective in order to create a product distinct from human perception.
When a person finds herself satisfied with the goodness of her immediate, physical surroundings, her internal motivation to reach out into the unseen for a spark to carry back with her naturally dulls. Why work for beauty when you can already see it sitting on the shelves of the china cabinet in front of you? There’s a reason why “starving artists” are stereotypically so prolific: their hunger fosters an imagination for the beauty with which it longs to be filled.
Furthermore, it’s not as though my creativity as a whole has disappeared. To the contrary, it has only been redirected toward the cultivation of my new home. Novel ideas still bounce around my mind, only they aren’t for forming new essays—they’re for filling my empty walls.
This isn’t wholly a bad thing. We honor God when we “work and keep” the corner of the cosmos he has given us to steward. However, I know myself, and I know my home is the foundation on which I’m most readily tempted to erect my shiniest idols: my comfort, my safety, my efficiency, my reputation. When I feed these idols, they offer me in return a pleasant rush of dopamine; but the dopamine wears off, and the idols always ask for more—for anything I’m willing to give them. A secure, beautiful, comfortable home can become a prison of insatiable desire, and there will never be an end to the projects I could pursue.
How should I now proceed? Is my artistic future doomed to decay as these brick walls surrounding me increasingly dictate my attention? Fortunately I think not. I think my creativity only needs a motivation greater than hunger.
I look now to my great Creator God—the one who made every star, every cell, every soul. My God does not hunger. He does not lack. So what was his motivation to imagine time and space and all which occupies them? What is his motivation to keep this cosmos spinning, moving, growing, dancing toward its telos?
Well, of course—it’s love. It has always been love. It will always be love. Love so great it would bear the wrath due to its object, all for the joy set before it.
So I will pray this God ever molds me into his loving image. I will pray he molds my fleshly body increasingly into a spiritual body—that is, a body animated by his loving Spirit. In this spiritual body I will follow the resurrected Son of Man. I will recognize these walls—these walls I have painted; these walls on which I have hung my art; these walls to which I look to keep me warm and safe—as the vapors they are. And I will walk through them—toward my immortal neighbors on the other side. I will open my doors, not only that others may come in, but also that I may go out, toward those who are scared, toward those who are lonely, toward those who are lost.
To be in-spired, after all, is to filled with spirit. Perhaps the spirit of hunger can produce some fruit. But it’s the Spirit of Love who knows no bounds, and it’s the Spirit of Love who reigns over all created things. I am so very glad this Spirit calls me “friend.”