Crowd the Flowers, Never the Light

Dear friend,

Some lessons arrive with a brush in your hand.

A while ago I was testing a summer palette — oranges, ochres, that yellow that only July believes in — on a piece of scrap paper I kept beside the real painting. Just swatches. No plan, no pressure, paint trying itself out. And halfway through the "real" piece I looked over and realized: I liked the scrap paper better.

It had a loose orange flower in the corner that shone with the light of promise — that unfinished feeling of something still becoming. It was the kind of page a little girl makes, swirling color for no reason at all.

Then I remembered the rules. A painting needs depth, said the part of me that had been to the classes. Add a swatch of purple.

I knew the instant the brush lifted. Well, shoot — there goes that. It looked like purple blood on the page. Nothing was wrong with purple; purple was innocent. What killed the painting was the moment the playing became trying. My brain walked in, and the spirit walked out.

(I eventually cut that page into little cards and mailed it into the world as thank-you notes — which feels, looking back, like the right kind of burial. It got to end as it began: small, unforced pieces of color, asking nothing.)

I used to think this lesson was about empty space — leave some white paper, don't fill every corner. And that's half true. On my table right now is a night garden, flowers rioting along the bottom edge while the starry sky above them stays open and dark. Every time I want to add one more bloom up high, I hear the rule this letter is named for: crowd the flowers, never the light. The quiet places are what make the loud places loud.

But here's the other half, the part the scrap paper taught me: the light isn't emptiness. It's unforced-ness. The quiet corner of a painting — or a life — is wherever nothing is being demanded, proven, or produced. It's the page with no assignment on it.

And in July, those pages are hard to come by. Our lake house fills like a summer inn — beds full, table full, dock full, heart full. The white spaces of life don't come labeled or scheduled. They just come, and as quickly flit away.

Mine come with the lake. When my eyes land on that water — always changing, always the same blue — they rest. My favorite seat in the world is the front seat of the boat: sometimes a boat crowded with people and dogs headed to lunch across the lake, sometimes just my always-captain and me on a sunset tour around the little islands. Either way, the motor hums too loud for conversation, and I am handed a peculiar, glorious isolation — endless water, mountains, light. Nothing is asked of me there. Unassigned glory.

Notice something with me: the boat is full. The quiet isn't somewhere away from the people I love. It's the front seat of the same boat — going the same direction as everyone dear to me, with the light laid out ahead like a path on the water. The Shepherd wrote it long before I painted it: He leads me beside still waters. He restores my soul. Souls are restored beside water, where nothing is asked of them.

So here is my question for you, friend: where is your scrap paper? The corner of your week with no assignment on it — no result expected, nobody grading, nothing to prove. It may be ten minutes with coffee before anyone wakes. It may be a front seat somewhere with the noise of your own full, beloved life humming behind you.

Whatever it is: guard it. Fill your days with good things, yes — crowd the flowers.

But never the light.

With light and gratitude, from the front seat,
Marla

P.S. — The photo above is the actual seat, on an actual evening. And I'd truly love to know: where is your scrap paper? Reply and tell me — I read every one.