It's Okay to Not Bloom Where You're Planted

I am an unashamed re-reader. I’ve read Animal, Vegetable, Miracle no fewer than five times, The Supper of the Lamb about three times. Annie' Dillard’s American Childhood several times over and pick any of L’Engles and I’ve read them all multiple times. Eugene Peterson will never grow old for me, neither will Lewis, Robinson, Updike, O’Connor, or Norris.

It’s rare that I find a contemporary book I’ll read a few times over, but this past week I picked up Christie Purifoy’s Placemaker again. I skim-read it when it released last year, but I think it was in the middle of the bathroom renovation and mostly I forget everything about that month except construction dust and how to install a faucet.

I read every word of Placemaker this time, far past my bedtime each night. Using the thread of various trees, Christie writes through the series of cross-country moves her family has taken since she and her husband married: Texas, Virginia, Chicago, Florida, and now Pennsylvania. It could be that I knew the exact trees of which she spoke, having grown up in Pennsylvania, then lived in New York, Tennessee, New York again, Texas, Colorado, Virginia, and Texas again—with most of my immediate family living in Florida now. The spaces of which she spoke, the terrain, the trees, the weather, and the people—all of it so familiar. When she writes of where she lives now, I know the place exactly because I grew up one county east and spent much of my childhood in the places she describes.

During all this talk about trees, she also weaves the story of going and leaving and being and growing and staying in all these spaces. She doesn’t romanticize the very difficult nature of uprooting and trying to replant our bodies, minds, and hearts in various places—and in this I found kinship.

It reminded me of Richard Power’s stunning work Overstory . In it, he writes:

“We found that trees could communicate, over the air and through their roots. Common sense hooted us down. We found that trees take care of each other. Collective science dismissed the idea. Outsiders discovered how seeds remember the seasons of their childhood and set buds accordingly. Outsiders discovered that trees sense the presence of other nearby life. That a tree learns to save water. That trees feed their young and synchronize their masts and bank resources and warn kin and send out signals to wasps to come and save them from attacks. Here’s a little outsider information, and you can wait for it to be confirmed. A forest knows things. They wire themselves up underground. There are brains down there, ones our own brains aren’t shaped to see. Root plasticity, solving problems and making decisions. Fungal synapses. What else do you want to call it? Link enough trees together, and a forest grows aware.” 

Neither Nate nor I have ever truly had roots anywhere. His parents live in a house crafted by the hands of his ancestors, on a road named for the family, down the street from a graveyard in which their remains have been buried for a 100 and more years. But he didn't grow up there, he’s never even lived there. He grew up all over the world—which is a privilege and a blessing, but does not a single root give you.

I grew up in a space I love, but have nothing there now, no home and no family save a brother. My family lives along the eastern seaboard, putting their roots down as far north and as far south as you can go from the former things. The idea of roots as stabilizers, feeders, resources, and savers does not run in our DNA.

But we long for it. We long for it with a gnawing hunger I cannot describe.

Last week I read a very long Atlantic article about the nuclear family and the kin we now make on our own because the great 2.5 kids, picket fence experiment of the 1950s and 60s did not last. The nostalgic among us—whose ideas of family are formed more by Norman Rockwell paintings and seventies sitcoms—tell us this kind of togetherness must be possible again, but I agree with the article and doubt that it is. Not for most of us. Americans have always been explorers and risk-takers, willing to leave it all if they sense a call. And 2020 makes it easier to feel connected than ever before—even if we’re not.

Back to Placemaker. I felt comforted while reading because Christie is a native Texan writing of her non-native Pennsylvania, and I am a native Pennsylvanian in my non-native Texas. I felt known, seen, heard, and somehow, rooted. To see my place through the eyes of another, to look around and see her place through my eyes the next day—it comforted me.

A few months ago I wrote about how the old adage, “Bloom where you’re planted,” has always felt sour to me. First, nothing blooms all the time, sometimes things just aren’t blooming and that’s okay. And second, some things don’t bloom where they’re planted. A sugar maple will never flourish here in Dallas and we couldn’t keep a cactus alive outside in the north if we tried. Some things were made to be and bloom and flourish and grow right where they bloom and flourish best. It says nothing about the land in which they’re planted and everything about the God who made a very big earth with very different climates and every kind of plant and fruit-bearing tree.

“Seeds remember the seasons of their childhood.”

Maybe not everyone wants to return to the scents and smells and places of their childhood, but I think I always will. My brain and body remember I grew there the most.

If you’re waiting me to spiritualize this into something about the new heaven and new earth, I’m not going to. If there’s anything the last few years have taught me, it’s that over-spiritualizing the physical and tangible cultivates a discontent with right here and now. My friend John Blase tweeted this morning, “Love the corruptible world,” and I remembered my favorite poem again, “Love Calls us to the Things of this World.” It is important to love the future world, but to let that love trickle down into a love for this world, this land, these trees, these places and spaces, and these people.

Or perhaps the love for these things floats up into a love for the future things. I don’t know. I’m not going to think about it too much. I’m just going to be grateful for the trees in our yard, even if they’re not towering sugar maples and bushy lilacs. They’re doing their best right where God meant for them to be.