Home Soul

Hi Folks,

We know that the entrance to your home is not just an opening surrounded by wood, allowing access by swinging a wood or metal panel door, but a passageway where you welcome family and friends. It is a threshold that you crossed as newlyweds or when you brought home your newborn child, an opening through which strangers became neighbors, where children ran out to play and ran in to find safety and security. It is the threshold where each day you crossed over into the outside world to work and earn a living and then back to find your way back at night to enter into a place of respite and rejuvenation.

We know that the walls in your home are not just sheetrock and plaster, but structures that create spaces in your life, places to sleep and rest, read or study, places to entertain, play, or cook, places of privacy to get ready for work or bed. They are surfaces that hold the color that gives birth to moods, feelings, and energies. We know that walls are living (and for living in) things!

And windows! We know they are not just glass surrounded by wood molding or sills, but openings through which you can hear sounds each morning that beckon you to arise. They are special places where you sit and take a moment to reflect or even pray, as you take in the sunlight of a summer day, or the gray light of one of those cloudy, rainy slow-down days, or watch the snow fall down gently to the ground. Windows are an opening where the silence of nature or cityscape might reach in and fill your soul as it expands your world inviting you to feel part of a larger city or community, planet, and even universe. The pine trees in my backyard continually pour silence and stillness through the windows of my home.

When Larkin Painting Company comes into your home with our tools, we know that they are extensions of our hands, as we shape surfaces and apply color like a potter, creating spaces that will hold you and bring beauty that will uplift you and comfort you. When we enter your home and take our shoes off or put on protective booties, we do not do that just to keep the place clean, but also because we know that your floors that we stand on had been made sacred by the many hundreds of miles of steps (especially in an older home) taken by people both living and deceased.

When we don’t turn on a radio, it is not just because we are worried that we might disturb you or you might not like our kind of music, but rather your home has its own sounds, silences, and stillness that speak to us. When we go home at night or at the end of the job, we take the piece of soul in this world that your home has captured and allow it to nurture us, our families, our friends, and our children.

For us, your home is not just brick, wood, and mortar. It is a living imaginal piece of real estate (just as real as a stone) that can bring about and hold in place Larkin Painting Company’s dream of a beloved community of men, women, and children of all races, religions, sexualities, colors, and creeds.

Be well,

Bill