Finding Creative Space in a Crowded World

High Calling and Laity Lodge friend Linford Detwieler, one-half of the singing duo, Over the Rhine, wrote a moving essay for Image Magazine.

With profound imagery, he writes of his quest to find creative space in a crowded world. Although he grew up in the open spaces of Pennsylvania, he found himself chasing the dream in the middle of a city in Ohio. He wrote songs in an elevated apartment with the city sounds crashing all around him. The only natural world he could see from his workspace was “narrow corridors of sky, obscured at night by a milky street-lit veil.”

Despite the lack of natural beauty, he still found a bubbling spirit of creation’s-dream in his soul.

“I was a young songwriter in a beautiful city, but haunted by shaded green days gone by,” he wrote.

He later met a woman, who became his wife. Together they stumbled on an old farm for sale, drenched with more than a century and a half of history. They moved in and found their space – not in comfort or style – but simplicity. It was rich world of birds, animals, and soil that sprouted a garden rich with bounty. Looking at the property’s undefined property lines, Linford’s father advised them to “leave the edges wild. Let the songbirds have hidden thorny places for their untamed music.”

They began to assimilate the natural world by naming what they observed. They now know the songbirds, insects, trees, and animals by their proper species – a sign of respect and honor. Just the same way when you call a person by name that waits on you at a restaurant or checks you out at the grocery story, proper names imply that you are taking notice.

“I am now a human largely surrounded by a world not made by human hands. I have given this gift a measure of my attention. I have tried to call things by name,” he writes

Not all of us can be artists, writers, or craftsman. In fact, much of the real work in this world is less creative and more reactive to a consumptive planet. But we can take some lessons in appreciating what beauty we have around us, ingesting the goodness of God in the simplest of blessings, and do our very best with what we have been charged to do.

“I take my place upon this particular piece of earth,” writes Linford. “I try to do my work.”

Read this beautiful article here.

Post by Newsletter Editor David Rupert. Image credits to be found in the accompanying gallery.