The Anti-Pinterest

We live in a Pinterest world: a world that promises to gratify our desires instantly and visually.  Described recently as “porn for white women,” Pinterest specifically--and the internet in general--allows us to “visualize our delusional fantasies.” It is a place of yearning, but not, alas, a place of real fulfillment. I think the comparison of Pinterest to pornography is illuminating, for porn feeds on a legitimate and beautiful desire, but whereas sex should bring the individual into actual encounter and fruitful union, porn leads instead to isolation and sterility. No real satisfaction, no consummation. In the same way Pinterest feeds on desires—and our *noble* desires at that!—but delivers no real thing, only images, snippets, memes.

Of course there are legitimate uses for Pinterest—and it is most often a benign source of entertainment. At its best it can help with planning, organize useful information, even connect people (Pinning party anyone??  J ). But at its worst it feeds off of dissatisfaction and something else—greed? Not necessarily greed for money or things (though that happens) but greed for the perfect scene, the glowing day, the fulfilled life.

This is a temptation that I face, and I assume it is something that many of you have struggled with from time to time. It is the temptation of a fast-paced, commercialized, online world: our world. With all this in mind I am sensitive to how my blogging content might interact or contribute to this kind of (falsified, dimished) reality. I am not the best photographer or the most engaging writer on the interwebs, and I have almost no technical know-how. So I am probably not going to be *able* to create a pristine online existence, that will tempt or distress my (limited!) audience. But I am aware that blogs necessarily portray an edited (though not necessarily false) version of reality. This is why we love blogs. So I want to emphasize from the very beginning the flawed nature of my own life.** I want to make sure I blog about the struggles from time to time, without—I hope—resorting to complaining or pity-seeking. 

But I will also strive to portray the beauty I see in my own life. And I am committed to treating my blogging as such: an attempt to *see* the blessings in my own imperfect existence: the beauty of my children, simple daily pleasures.

More specifically I hope to try to understand life better through our time at Wise Road: to gain wisdom from the change in our life, from the renovation, and from learning to live away from the noise and busy-ness (even the *beautiful* noise and *happy* busy-ness) that is our life in the city.

And already I begin to suspect that *this* journey will be, in fact, an antidote to an online existence, an anti-Pinterest. What does renovating a farmhouse look like on Pinterest after all? Before and After, snap, like this:

What does living in the country look like? This:

 

and this:

And, of course, this:

What does working the land look like on Pinterest?

 

But what did it look like for me, from where I stood this past weekend, looking out over fifteen acres on a hillside above Wise Road? It looked like sweat, like grass in my bra, and several ticks in my skin, and many more chiggers. It looked like a thousand trees, every tree in need of pruning, and me with my weak arms and insufficient tools taking almost an hour to remove three or four small branches. It looks like me unable to start the lawnmower. It looks like locking my two small children in a bare room with snacks for twenty minutes at a time so I could cut down individual weeds in a field of weeds.

Pinterest didn’t help me this weekend, with my frustration as the magnitude of the task threatened to overwhelm me. For my legitimate and noble desire is to lovingly cultivate the land. My ideal landscape is the fruitful and cultivated landscape of England, which has been farmed and tended by a race of gardeners for a thousand years. Pinterest feeds this desire instantly thus:

 

With images like this in my mind (and carefully collected on my Board) I remain ill-equipped to even *begin* to tend and cultivate fifteen acres of mismanaged land in Kansas. I walk the paths we cut through the pasture and I see no end to it. Is it any wonder I find it difficult to make a beginning?

But a beginning is what I must make. “It’s a whole life’s work,” Devin told me cheerfully, as he dragged a branch through the gap in the fence. It will probably take a whole lifetime, possibly more than one lifetime, to cultivate this land. But it is this kind of work that speaks most about what life is. Pinterest can’t say it. Life doesn’t have a “Pin it!” button. Life is long and confusing, the work is hard, the results slow in coming. Life is labor. But it is a labor of love, and love always—I trust—bears fruit. 

**For example: right now, in order to finish this post, I am ignoring the fact that my one year old is running around with an open marker and a stinky diaper.