One of the little tidbits I jotted down in my phone and then in my commonplace notebook (a place where I collect quotes, lyrics, words, poems, thoughts, and such) recently was this: “A clean barn has no oxen.”  I am going to confess that, as a pastor’s wife, I didn’t know that little nugget of wisdom was directly from the Bible.  Well, it is.  It’s from Proverbs 14:4.  

When I heard it, though, it resonated with me right away.

I have gone through various seasons on the neatness scale in the span of my 48 years.  I was pretty messy as a young kid, and my mom would have to bribe me to organize my room instead of shoving everything under the bed and calling it clean.  Somewhere along the way, though, my picky, fastidious nature came to the forefront, and I embraced the satisfaction that came with being tidy and having a place for everything.  Then, I went overboard.  I obsessed over vacuum marks and made a bed that was wrinkle-free and had perfectly placed pillows and stuffed animals.  Everything had to be just so.  This carried into my college years, which was simultaneously sad and comical.  I’d be racing around our little apartment when we hosted friends, picking up trash, wiping up spills, and getting agitated that people were messing up my clean environment instead of enjoying their company.  In my early 20s, if you set a drinking glass down on my coffee table for too long, it would get collected, washed, and put away in a blink.

I’m happy to report that kids pulled me out of the obsessively neat phase.  I realized pretty early on that I would be miserable if I looked at my husband and two boys solely as mess makers who only made more work for me.  It pushed me at times, and I didn’t always do it perfectly, but I learned to relax my standards and embrace the fact that having a perfectly neat and clean home wasn’t the greatest accomplishment in life.  I didn’t need an epitaph that read, “Here lies Marian Parsons, who kept a very clean house.”

Now I’m sitting somewhere on the spectrum where I just don’t want my house to kill anyone.  When discussing room expectations with my son Calvin, I put it this way: No colonies.  I have tidiness and stuff thresholds for the spaces I use the most, but my perspective has decidedly shifted.

I try to keep my studio neat and organized, but I inevitably end up with reading stacks, notebook stacks, and paper stacks.  There are works in progress, paintings on the drying shelf and in the drying rack, tools I just used or am about to use, and a collection of things I need to photograph, review, or write about.  I often have to shimmy around tripods and make sure I don’t put a fine art print in a blob of wet paint or ink.

The Marian who vacuumed several times each week sometimes rears her head and shakes it at me.

These words from Proverbs, though, remind me that mess is proof of life.  The stalls that need to be mucked and hay that needs to be replenished mean there is life in the barn, there is something valuable that needs tending.  It’s a place of productivity, a place where things are happening.  It’s messy, yes, but no farmer wants an empty, clean barn.

While we may want an empty, clean house for magazine or real estate photos, it’s not really where we live.  We may want a clean creative workspace for the start of a new project or for a social media post, but it’s not really where we create.

My buffet of art supplies and stacks of books aren’t problems that need to be solved.  They are proof of life.