Michael Banning’s Two Houseplants (2023) is, at first glance, a modest still life: two potted plants resting on a table, angled sunlight spilling across their leaves, a patterned curtain softening the backdrop. Yet the longer I stay with it, the more the painting feels like a mirror. I don’t just see plants. I see myself and my oldest friend Nate—two lives that sprouted together, grew side by side, bent in different directions, and yet, through resilience and return, continue to share light.
We were nearly inseparable as boys. To be baptized on the same day is to be joined in a peculiar intimacy, rising from the same waters as if planted in the same soil. From there, our roots intertwined—youth group meetings, church camps, late-night talks about life, and eventually, standing together at the front of the sanctuary to lead worship. I remember the many times we played Audio Adrenaline’s The Houseplant Song. Its playful satire—about hiding from the world with nothing but “my houseplants and me”—made us laugh so hard we could barely keep ourselves in rhythm. (clang. sorry) The absurdity became ours. Two teenagers, half-serious in faith and half-aware of its comic contradictions, grinning at each other as the others at Brown Bag chuckled along.
When I look at Banning’s painting, I see how one plant grows tall and straight, leaves striped with complexity, while the other spreads outward, round-leafed, exuberant. That, too, was us. Through high school, graduation, and even a stretch of college together, we seemed aligned, two stems reaching for the same light. But as Erik Erikson reminds us, young adulthood is often a time of divergence—what he called the tension between intimacy and isolation. We began to bend toward different suns. For me, the questions of faith grew larger than the certainties I had been given; for him, there was a steadier rootedness. Plants of the same species, grown in different corners of a room, will turn in different directions depending on the windows they face. Friendship is no different.
For years, our pots stood apart. Yet psychology tells us that attachment bonds, once formed, rarely vanish. John Bowlby suggested that our earliest and deepest attachments create “internal working models,” templates of trust and love that linger beneath the surface. Old friends occupy this deep layer of the psyche. Even in absence, the bond continues to shape us. And so, when Nate and I reconnected years later, the soil was ready. Not in the pews or classrooms of our youth, but in the unlikely medium of online gaming. Sailing together in Sea of Thieves, shouting across digital oceans, we found ourselves laughing again, just as we had with guitars in hand. The medium was new, but the friendship was the same: resilient, re-rooted, and alive.
Banning’s still life offers a philosophy of friendship in visual form. The plants differ in size, shape, and angle, yet they share the same shaft of sunlight. Their coexistence does not require sameness, only proximity to the same sustaining light. Aristotle described friendship, or philia, as the recognition of goodness in another—a relationship where one’s flourishing is tied to the flourishing of the other. Centuries later, Montaigne, reflecting on the death of his closest companion, wrote: “If you press me to say why I loved him, I feel that it cannot be expressed, except by replying: Because it was he, because it was I.” Such is the mystery of enduring friendship: it cannot be fully explained, only lived.
And perhaps there is something playful in this recognition, too. The faint echo of The Houseplant Song lingers in my memory. What began as parody—a lyric about locking oneself away with ferns and avoiding the world—has become, in hindsight, an emblem of resilience. Friendship sometimes does look like that: two figures in a room, surviving the seasons together, even when the wider world changes. There is a strange holiness in that kind of companionship, not in withdrawal from the world, but in remaining rooted through it.
Friendship, like a plant, needs tending—water, light, attention. Yet it also surprises us with its endurance. You can neglect a plant, leave it in a corner, and years later discover it leaning still toward the sun, waiting for care. That is the truth Banning’s painting whispers: growth is slow, but bonds endure.
So when I look at Two Houseplants, I see more than greenery. I see the long arc of friendship—rooted in childhood, bent by circumstance, stretched by distance, and renewed in unexpected soil. And faintly, from the corner of memory, I hear two teenagers laughing through a worship service, strumming along as they sing about houseplants, still turning toward the light, still being put to the test, still talking about all the things that matter most like life and love and happiness and then the Holy Ghost.