Our theme for the month of February is “plants.”
Whenever MC and I repot one of our houseplants, I always mistakenly expect the plant to pour forth out of the pot, accompanied by a trailing avalanche of loose dirt. This rarely happens. After a little coaxing, a mature plant that has maximized its pot potential should pop out easily as a single block. Conversely, I’m always surprised by the intertwined clump of entangled roots and dirt that hangs as a sturdy unit from the above-ground body of the plant. Somehow I forget that plants have extensive root infrastructures integral to their vitality, which also holds the dirt, pebbles, and other subterranean bits in place. In healthy plants, root systems should comprise around thirty percent of the plant.
It’s why moving, a form of uprootedness, can be described so aptly with the metaphor of repotting. Wherever we make our homes as humans, we inevitably become tangled up with a set of daily rhythms, relationships, and practices that become familiar, eventually so much so that they become part of us, for good or bad, nourishing our growth or a lack thereof. Naturally, we carry our past identities—a bundled clump of home—with us when we move somewhere new, and finding a new pot that fits can be disorienting.
I experienced this feeling of displacement most acutely during our first months in Seattle when we struggled to find a new church community. We first visited a nearby Baptist church where the congregation was so elderly I was afraid to shake anyone’s hand, not because of COVID but at the fear of one of their fragile limbs breaking off in my grip. At another church, we were bombarded by an overzealous greeter in an oddly pushy way. We appreciated the friendliness of the pastor somewhere else, but the ministry itself wasn’t a good fit. “It is rare to meet believers in Seattle,” the pastor told us. “When you do, you naturally form a special bond.”
Cue the scene from The Chamber of Secrets where Ron Weasley pulls a shrieking, disgruntled mandrake plant out of its pot in Professor Sprout’s Herbology class and you’ll get the idea of how I felt, perhaps with a bit less drama. Why did all of these places not feel like potential homes, I worried.
In Ann Arbor, we had been part of a very small, liturgical, Christian Reformed ministry focused on grad students. In Seattle, because it was our intention to explore new church options—envisioning a larger, multi-generational church that we hoped could even be within walking distance—we resisted for almost two months taking a very obvious path, which was to check out the very similar Christian Reformed church near the University of Washington’s campus in Seattle. It had even been recommended to us by our pastors in Michigan. When we finally did visit, it was immediately apparent that, in the midst of everything else in our lives being in flux, this church would provide familiar, nourishing soil and offer a needed measure of groundedness.
While familiarity is essential, any successful repotting cannot ignore the crucial step of massaging the roots. This removes the majority of the dirt that hangs below the plant, breaking up the knotty bunches of root and soil until only free-hanging tendrils remain. This helps the plant take to its new pot, encouraging it to expand into a larger space.
When I was navigating what to do next after completing a master’s program, it was difficult to identify the ways I needed to undergo massaging. I am someone who easily becomes complacent in familiar rhythms and patterns, so originally I was quite intent on trying to remain at the University of Michigan for a PhD. I even thought about not applying anywhere else if it would require uprooting our lives to a distant location. Only after receiving very sage advice from an academic mentor about the value of expanding my network and finding a better institutional fit did I expand my net of applications. In a sense, I had become rootbound, a condition where constricting, circular roots coil around the base of the pot, threatening to choke the plant. Without a breaking loose of the old, sometimes there simply isn’t room to grow.
If I may stretch the repotting metaphor one final time, the soil, or societal environment, that one is replanted in will inevitably differ in the new pot. Seattle is very much a microcosm of the most urgent problems in American society, notably extreme poverty versus extreme wealth, homelessness, addiction and mental health, and the drug epidemic. Living out a faithful Christian response here looks different than it did in Michigan. Besides showing compassion and humility, I am not yet sure what this requires, but I’m slowly letting my roots engage and take hold in this new space. Maybe it is fitting that Seattle is a city of transplants, where fewer than three in ten adults were even born in Washington. I will never be truly from here, but I am doing my best to make it my home.
Image from John Ernest Weaver, The Ecological Relations of Roots, Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1919.
Chad Westra (’15) is a Ph.D. student at the University of Washington where he studies modern Chinese history. He enjoys chess, following Detroit sports, and caring for the overgrowth of plants in his condo.
