Review by Kimberly Coyle. Kimberly Coyle is a freelance writer and a regular contributor to In Touch magazine. She teaches writing at Fairleigh Dickinson University in New Jersey.
For years, my friend Kristin privately prayed for a garden with “one towering oak tree,” where she and her husband might create a place for others to rest and retreat. When they recently purchased a home in their native Southern California, the land surrounding it surpassed her own secret desires. Their new home sits on acres of land with lush succulent gardens and is lined with over a dozen mature oak trees. Kristin and her husband envision a property where they might raise their family, but they also want to create space for pastors and writers to connect with God beneath the shelter of thick branches and green leaves. They hope to build a legacy on the land and become rooted as wide and deep as the towering oaks that surround them.
When I heard their story, my first instinct was to reach into my bag and press the book I’d been reading into Kristin’s hands. I resisted only because my copy of Christie Purifoy’s book, Placemaker: Cultivating Places of Comfort, Beauty, and Peace, was already covered in inky scribbles. I’d underlined and starred far too many passages (and taken far too many notes) to make this gift a welcome one.
In Placemaker, Purifoy explores themes of rootedness and belonging and, as the title suggests, she writes of cultivating places of rest and retreat, of spaciousness and peace. She also muses on the secret life of trees. “A longing fulfilled is a tree of life” Purifoy writes, and Kristin’s new home with its towering oaks comes to mind.
Casting Seeds of Love
Each chapter of Placemaker is named for a wood or a specific tree: Saucer Magnolia, Silver Maple, Penn’s Woods, Pine Tree, and so on. “What is placemaking?” she writes. “It is deliberately sending your roots deep into a place, like a tree.” She uses the overarching metaphor of trees to root readers in the reality of a physical place. Naming them, describing them by bark and leaf, anchors readers to the places Purifoy explores in her book. She evokes a world that is touchable and tangible, where her lyrical prose offers respite to readers overwhelmed with social media memes and soundbites. Reading Placemaker is akin to swaying in a hammock beneath the shade.
Purifoy invites readers on a journey to the places she’s called home throughout her life, from her childhood in Texas to her current home, a rambling Victorian farmhouse in Pennsylvania. The trees represent the greater themes of the book: home, belonging, cultivation, rootedness, and legacy. She writes, “I have always longed for roots, and I have always wanted to belong to a particular place.” She invites readers into these particular places and writes of how they made her—and how she, in turn, made them.
Purifoy asks readers to consider what it means to build a meaningful life and “cast seeds of love” wherever we might find ourselves, whether that place is temporary or permanent. Each town and home where we live is an opportunity for placemaking, for choosing to belong through the embodied work of cultivating spaces of peace. In Purifoy’s life, “peace and place are indistinguishable.”
Placemaker asks us to join God in making all things new, in cultivating beauty to honor a God who makes all things beautiful, and in honoring our deep, God-given longing for a place to call home. As someone with an incurable case of wanderlust, this longing to belong still connects with me on a profound level. I have lived and traveled all over the world, and yet I long to know what it means to live with permanence, what it means to remain.
As Purifoy reminds us, “To grow roots, we must choose at times to be still, to dance in place. I have learned that lesson from the trees.” This image of dancing in place stays with me when I find myself wondering what life might look like in a different location than my home in the ho-hum suburbs of New Jersey. In Placemaker, home is “never simply a threshold you cross. It is a place you make and a place that might make—or unmake—you.”
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Source: Christianity Today
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