My Garden City
WORK, REST, AND THE ART OF BEING HUMAN.
To my core, I am a creative person that thrives in community.
Whether it’s design critiques, or book clubs, I love connecting with others on a deeper level of thinking and creating. I enjoy designing, but when I collaborate with others to make my ideas better than I imagined, that’s my favorite place to be — where beauty and community intersect. I deeply adore this space. It doesn’t exist only with art though, there is a beauty in sharing ideas and experiences to reach a common goal or understanding. Just like design critiques, it’s this passing of experiences, ideas, and life that fuels something within my spirit, the act of creation.
I recently started a book club with a group of women out of a desire to build community with the purpose of connecting through story.
Out of three recommendations, we decided on Garden City by John Mark Comer. The first part of this book wrestles with what it’s like to find your identity in the work that you do, the true work you’re called and created to do. We reflected on ways we were raised, the assumptions we grew up with, and finding true identity through experiences we thrived in or felt exhausted by.
When dreaming about what this first gathering could look like, I wanted to design an experience beyond the conversations we would have. I desired the beauty of community and story as well as physical and tangible beauty we could participate in together. Out of a need of my own (not having a proper bookmark) I came up with the idea of creating garden-like bookmarks with pressed flowers that we could each design ourselves. This was a great way to work with our hands while engaging in literal hours of beautiful conversation.
My Garden City thrives where beauty and community are given the space to grow.
We reflected on the first half of Part 1 in the book: Work. It opens with one simple question: If you could do anything, what would you do?
Take a moment and open your notes app, or your journal, and write out your answer to this question. Take time to dream bigger than what you think you’re capable of, what you think you’re really meant to do. When you meet someone new and they inevitably ask “What do you do?” they’re really asking you “What are you giving your life to?” Are you a business owner, a college student, a stay at home parent, a designer, a teacher, a first responder, ____ fill in the blank. Does your answer align with the first question, “If you could do anything…?”
I wrote a one sentence answer. Sat back into the chair at the local coffee shop, sipped my iced lavender matcha, and picked my pen back up and wrote about a dozen more. My first sentence was about work. What followed was dreams I have for my life, my family, the way we will grow together, the Garden we will cultivate. That brings us to the next question in the book, “Is my work creating a garden like world?”
John Mark Comer draws parallels between God as creator, and humans as co-creators. Made in His image, we are designed to work and to rest. In Genesis 1 we read the story of creation where a wild and untamed world flourishes. Man enters the picture with the purpose of working the land, to create community, to rule over all that God had created. The first profession ever in existence was gardening. But the garden was never meant to just be a garden, its purpose was always to become a garden-city.