The other day I was doing some online research when I stumbled upon the listing of our neighborhood as a national historic district on the National Park Service website. The article said, “Land’s End Historic District…is a summer cottage colony developed by Russell W. Porter…[who] divided much of his property into lots and pursued a vision of an enclave of seasonal residents dedicated to experiencing nature, living a simplified existence and nurturing artistic talents (emphasis mine). At Land’s End Porter built cottages and created a summer community with lasting cohesion.”
As regular readers may recall, I wrote about Land’s End earlier here but this particular description of why Porter sought to develop the neighborhood stood out to me for all the reasons articulated above in italics. The very attributes that drew Linda and I here originally are the exact ones with which our corner of the world was intentionally designed. For us and our like-minded neighbors, nature, simplicity, and art represent the creativity of beauty.
And on that note, my mother recently shared with me this gem from fellow writer and photographer Vicki Kuyper: “Photography is one of the pursuits I’ve found where I can worship with childlike abandon. As I play with light and shadow, pattern and perspective, color and contrast, I’ve developed a habit of whispering a word of thanks, praising God for His handiwork right along with every photo I take…I can worship God through my lens as well as I can on my knees.”
Landscape watercolorist David Dewey, whose painting of Marshall Point (pictured above) we encountered long before moving here, adds this to the conversation: “God’s invisible qualities and divine nature. I think this is what has always come through my work. I was raised by parents with a deep faith in God, and they raised me to honor him with my life and my work, but it was never a religious decision to paint this way. Instead, it was the realization that I really am God’s creation living and working in his creation; nature for me has become the fundamental evidence of his handiwork.”
As writes Tish Harrison Warren, author of Liturgy of the Ordinary: Sacred Practices in Everyday Life: “Being curators of beauty, pleasure, and delight is therefore an intrinsic part of our mission, a mission that recognizes the reality that truth is beautiful.” If there is one thing that stands out to me about living here literally at Land’s End, it is the transcendence of our natural surroundings and how reflective of our Creator it all is. And it moves me to make art through my writing and photography that also communicates the beauty of creativity.