A broken tulip
The story behind the Substack.
“Show us something you’ve made,” the class moderator said, “that tells us who you are.”
I grabbed a pencil and sketched a broken tulip.
I’ve spent my life between cultures – the riddle of transience we’ll explore in this Substack – and the more places that shape me, the more I recognize the importance of our origins. My origin culture, perversely, is a transplanted one that has already morphed into something new. But it’s still the root, the place where stories of “how we came to be this way” begin.
I’m not Dutch. My name and my blood are. My grandparents on both sides left the Netherlands and my parents were raised as immigrant kids. They left Canada when I was three, but the Dutch immigrant community shaped them, their schools, their churches and their friends and became a culture that shaped me and my siblings, transplanted to the third continent in three generations.
In the upcoming essays I will challenge my culture of origin and the assumptions it holds. That’s why I start with a story I love, the story of the broken tulip. We critique best the people and places that belong to us, and that we love.
When I read about Tulip Fever I couldn’t shake the absurdity of it. My ancestors – in a culture praised for its practicality – sunk their financial investments into flowers. And the broken tulip, the one flower that cost more than a house? Had a virus, a ticking time bomb in its veins. They thought it was the most beautiful of all. Tulips are famous for their smooth, uniform colours. A broken tulip is all feathers and flame, irrepeatable patterns breaking up petals.
It’s hard to reconcile this with the stoicism my grandparents’ generation is famous for, but let me tell you something. An entire wave of Dutch people emigrated to Canada after their country was ravished by two wars and famines in between. They opened flower shops across the entire nation of Canada. Even in harsh winters, my grandmothers keep green things growing in every windowsill.
Edith Schaeffer quoted a Dutch proverb – I don’t know where she picked it up – that says if you have two loaves of bread, sell one and buy a lily. Beauty is half of sustenance.
There’s something tenacious about this story: the broken tulip is immeasurably precious because we name it so. Just like life.
As I offer up my stories and art to you – born of the specificity of the places that shaped me – I want to hear your stories, too. We’re all marked in our own ways.
We’re all full of contradictions. It’s what keeps us – world over – equals. I’m going to be naming some of those contradictions and together we’re going to bless them. They make us human.
I create from a contradiction that I live as a person of faith: from death comes life. Our bodies and this earth will live again, and we have our hands in that coming life, just as we have our hands in the world’s death.
Once, a friend asked me what my greatest wish was. “That we will all be made whole,” I said, without missing a beat.
I believe that telling our stories towards reconciliation – of self and the other, of humankind & the earth, of mind, body and heart, of past, present and future – builds wholeness, piece by piece.
Meanwhile my questions hover like bees around the hive of place and rupture, asking how and when and what and who.
Ready to join the journey? Slip your questions into your back pocket, and let’s go.
Maaike
PS — How has your origin culture shaped you in ways that you cherish? Let me know.