A Believer's Journal

Clay is used to make a pot
But it is the empty space within that makes it useful as a container
(From Tao Te Ching, Chapter 11)

And yet the empty space becomes useful only as it is constrained by the shape of the pot. The emptiness by itself cannot hold water or carrot soup or haddock chowder. It must be transmuted into a certain kind of emptiness, an emptiness that is no longer amorphous but defined, delimited, made purposeful. And the defining, delimiting, purpose-making, though accomplished by the pot, is not of the pot’s intention. The pot is the means by which an artisan transforms the emptiness and infuses it with usefulness.

Artisans employ imagination to transform emptiness. The imagination of a homebuilder fashions of emptiness a warm and congenial and inviting space to which to retreat. The imagination of a poet transfigures emptiness into the freighted silences between the words. The imagination of a peacemaker makes of emptiness, not an uneasy and anxious hiatus, but a contented and hopeful quietude.

Emptiness is the raw material, as it were, out of which artisans create not only usefulness, but beauty. The emptiness within any pot can hold water or carrot soup or haddock chowder, but that emptiness becomes all the more precious and the experience of the emptiness serving its purpose all the more satisfying when the pot is shaped with an artful or whimsical or exuberant eye. The silences between and among any string of words may be freighted, but the freight may be dull and uninspiring, or it may be enthralling and exhilarating, depending on the skill and imagination of the poet.

Out of emptiness emerges all that we may find gratifying and delightful and sacred in this life, when it is laid in the hands of a viruoso artisan.

Just yesterday, I bought two New Guinea impatiens, carefully chosen from among a colorful array of blooming Impatiens hawkeri. There were whites and scarlets, salmons and pinks, oranges and bi-colors, but I chose two exquisite SW 6973’s. Only, yesterday, I did not know they were SW 6973’s. I only knew I loved them above all the rest, adorned with ovoid petals of a most lovely silken lavender, not “Lavish Lavender” (SW 6975), not “Joyful Lilac” (SW 6972), not “Plum Blossom” (SW 6974), but SW 6973 … “Free Spirit.”

Free Spirit. A curious name for a color, but many colors on a painter’s palette have curious and often playfully suggestive names. Free Spirit. Is lavender the color of spirit? Not brash and bold and boasting, but subtle and soft and unassuming: humbly, exquisitely, timelessly beautiful? Free Spirit. Without edges, without boundaries, without borders, without walls, either to shut in or to shut out. No, free, filling the space it occupies, but also filling, infusing, beatifying any and all in its surrounding environs.

Lavender was not always my favorite color. From childhood, my favorite color was green, the color of an earth bursting with life, vibrant and soothing, luxuriant and intoxicating, a color to rest in, a color to revel in, a color to live in … forever. I am still in love with green, but lavender now commands first place in my heart, perhaps reflecting an ascendance of spirit over body, though, even as I write this, I recoil from any notion of wrongly bifurcating the two. Body and spirit are inextricably intertwined, me, not a soul trapped in a terrestrial costume, but me, as I seem to be, as I am, animated flesh, sentient protoplasm, a creature made from dust in the image of God. I am green. I am lavender. I am luxuriously and joyfully alive.