Claire Keiser
The Anselm Society’s Why We Create series is a year-long exploration of big ideas related to the Creator, how to see Him in the world He made, and how to bear His image. Explore the series. Want to contribute a story or meditation to the series? Learn more here.
I recently had lunch with an old friend. We both came from the Midwest to Colorado, and both met our husbands here. And now, a few years later, we were both struggling to put words to a sentiment that was not necessarily discontentment with Colorado…but a certain feeling of unsettledness. A feeling that we had not yet arrived, had not found home. Despite a good church and community here, my friend described herself as feeling "planted, but not rooted."
"Yes," I agreed, laughing, "I'm still in a little pot, and I want to be in a garden!"
This feeling, I'm sure, persists in certain atmospheres and temperaments no matter what the location. It also brings with it a level of embarrassment. Who wouldn't want to settle in Colorado Springs, a mile from the trailhead of Pikes Peak and surrounded by the sprawling Rockies? I am very happy to be here; there's no doubt of that. I've tried to soak up as much as I can of Aspen season, of the cold, clear mornings on backpacking trips, and the sighting of an occasional bear trundling through Garden of the Gods. There are times when I'm driving as the sun sets when I'm again taken aback by the erratic streaks of color that fade out behind the darkening mountain range and I have to catch my breath and remind myself I live here. I love that Ben and I are fifteen minutes from a handful of hiking trails and we can drive an hour and a half to catch gorgeous scenery that others have to drive a day for.
But lately things here have started to feel like a permanent vacation; the atmosphere of Manitou Springs lends itself to this -- even in the off-season, it is full of tourists, dads parking mini vans, and teenage girls standing stock-still on crosswalks taking photos (I was one of these not so many years ago!) The population here largely young people; free-thinking hippies who have left Kansas or Texas or California to try it in the Wild West. Streets are crowded, neighborhoods packed, and housing developments springing up faster than developers can clear land to build them. As as a midwesterner raised in a little 1950s ranch on a street populated mostly with old ladies, in a part of Des Moines where even rush hour added perhaps an extra five minutes to your commute, I've found myself lately thinking of those times with a distinct nostalgia.
But I think there's more to it than that. I can only correlate to an experience I had traveling in Europe in 2018. After a month alone in central Europe, I began to feel that eyes had been stuffed to the bursting. I had walked through so many art museums that in Belgium I could come across a Van Eyck or a Bruegel with only faintest stirrings of fascination. Worse still, I would look at a 14th-century cathedral and think "Oh, that's a nice cathedral." What sort of aesthetic stupor had I fallen into that I could ever allow a cathedral to suffer the degradation of being called nice?
I remember being frustrated with myself that in only 26 days of travel I seemed to have lost that Chestertonian "on running-after-one's-hat" sort of wonder - I no longer marveled at wooden posts and light in country lanes and could allow castles to pass my eyes uncelebrated. But I think Chesterton may have hit upon something in his essay Wonder and the Wooden Post (besides the wooden post of course). Reading Chesterton over the years has taught me just that: to marvel at wooden posts, to, when rivers were wanting, find joy in little creeks in neighbors backyards, to watch sparrows when eagles, moose, and bears were absent. The beauty of the ordinary is perhaps too ordinary a phrase to still possess beauty, but it does possess usefulness. My sense of unease in Colorado stems, I think, from a lack of ordinariness.
I've begun to wonder if, like in Europe, Colorado eventually begins to lend itself to an oversaturated imagination. Like any beauty, even the beauty of the Rockies can become mundane when experienced day in and day out. Unexpectedly, I've found myself wishing for plants. Green, lively plants that are not starved for water and oxygen like up here in the mountains. I wish I could wake up to mourning doves roosting on my parents' gutters and gentle sunrises and fields of soft, green dew-crowned grass, and that I could go to bed with the sound of locusts humming and the gentle whir of slow traffic through the sticky, cloudy night. (All of the adjectives make the midwest sound more idyllic than it is, perhaps .) These things are simple, Wendell Berryian, and proper for an ex-patriot Iowan.
I've begun this think of oversaturated imagination, too, as the surfeit of something that's wedged pretty deeply inside of me. Since I was a teenager, I remember experiencing this intense longing to travel and see things; to get out, to take what Patrick McManus called "the Big Trip." Informed by hobbits and Redwallers, I knew I needed to get out there and see as much as possible. In my early twenties, this took shape in trips around the Southeast while I was in school at Belhaven, and a summer in North Carolina with my friend Lilli. In each of those experiences, the beautiful things I would come across would create a certain poignancy - they are almost always equal parts satisfaction and longing to see more, or at least for the sight or experience to last longer.
This certainly happened when I came out to Colorado, especially in 2018. On my days off during Summit Semester, I would frequently be struck by what Lewis called a "stab of inconsolable longing," a particular feeling of "otherworldliness" that only beauty awakens. The Weight of Glory has long been my favorite Lewis essay because it gets at that idea so wonderfully; the idea of our "out-of-jointness" with this world being brought out most readily in moments of intense joy. That is why some joys feel like griefs - they are hints of a coming world, hints we only notice by their "tracks" as Lewis says. Often these tracks remind us of our deepest roots in another world.
Strangely, this feeling is much harder to access than it used to be. It seems to take work to generate. I can look out onto a mountain scene and see only shapes and colors with little or no meaning behind them. Surrounded by cliffs and rivers and caves and forests, I find myself thinking often of what I would grow if I had a herb garden and if someday I could get a pet rabbit. Sometimes my idle thoughts turn to brewing kombucha and taking evening bike rides sooner than to the next Big Trip.
Now I do not think ordinariness in itself is better than grandeur. I've begun to realize they both have their place, and perhaps grandeur and ordinariness, like so many things in our lives, are meant to come and go in seasons. The seasons of the year are like this, too: the radiance of springs precedes the dryness of summer, and the color-fields of fall are followed by repetitive, sometimes-dull-sometimes-wholesome winter days. After a season in Colorado (almost three years!) I'm starting to let my mind turn again towards "a little hobbit hole with the kettle just beginning to sing."
Yes - perhaps this whole ramble is merely what Bilbo experienced as his "Tookishness" at war with his Baggins side. Whatever it may be rooted in, I can be sure of this: I want my imagination to constantly be renewed - brought to newness - by whatever beauty I see. I'm praying for God to reawaken me to the beauty of what's in front of me - natural beauty, relational beauty, literary beauty, and the beauty of His own presence. As we head off to Vermont this summer and launch into three months of travel and adventure, I want to ask God to sharpen that "stab of longing" in me again; and in the midst of that, that I will learn to be content to dig slender roots in to even that little pot for now.
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This article was originally published on the author’s blog. It was reposted with permission and has been edited slightly for clarity.
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