Way Finding
It’s raining right now. Has been all day, actually. I have to turn on a light in each room I enter because the sky has remained stuck in the same wan light of early morning. This kind of weather is all the more delicious for how exceedingly rare a day like this is in Madagascar.
I mention this because it might not be raining at the moment where you are so you may not be properly prepared for cozy, drizzly sort of thoughts that can only properly be hatched inside a snug house with a constant drum of rain on the roof. Perhaps we should do this. Picture me all curled up under a blanket. You can envision my cup of hot cocoa, too, if you like. That would be historically accurate. The weather has been warming in the past few weeks but today’s rain has temporarily brought back the cooler temperatures and I’m still a little damp from being out in it earlier. That’s sufficient excuse to justify hot cocoa in the spring. And this will be a hot cocoa on a rainy day kind of essay.
A year ago today I saw Malagasy lightning bugs for the first time. We were trudging through a primary forest with a group of herpetologists doing field work. They were unearthing snakes and frogs on the river bank, in the brush and plucking them from trees. We rounded a corner in the path and saw a dot of light up ahead. It was too small and low to be the glow of nocturnal lemurs’ eyes caught in our flashlights’ beams. It was quickly joined by another. Then another. Within a moment we were surrounded by dozens of blinking lights darting in and out of the trees.
Growing up in the South and the Midwest, I have seen untold numbers of lightning bugs but no twinkling over farmers’ fields could prepare me for being encircled in a forest far from human habitation with a cadre of lightning bugs. Their intermittent signals were interrupted as they floated behind a tree trunk or into the underbrush, only to reappear again on the other side. It gave me the distinct impression that we’d stumbled into a fairy soirée in the woods. Need I tell you that such a thing feels like magic made visible?
I’m drawn back to that memory today as I try to capture what my creative practices feel like in this moment. It’s usual for a question to drive me to my notebooks, sewing table, or sketchbook. Curiosity-fueled creating is a life giving way to work. Those questions might show up as unfinished scraps of fabric waiting to be sewn together, a line that demands I follow it around a sketchbook page, words accumulating in a notebook, or grabbing my camera whenever the light paints a particularly compelling silhouette. I love the energy of creating something that I don’t know the end of.
Right now, though, it feels different. My creativity is an incessant tugging. It is a pull toward, though I don’t know yet to what I’m being drawn. I only know the next steps. Writing and sharing my words. Sewing little scraps of fabric into blocks. Mending a hole in a beloved dress. Inscribing my words on colorful pieces of paper. I am simply following those pin pricks of light that keep winking on and off a bit further on the path.
This part of my story feels less like following a determined path and more like way finding. Not the clinical type done with a map and compass. It’s a messy, pell mell sort of careening along a path. It looks like scribbling in three different notebooks at once, with half a dozen apps open to capture different hints as they come tumbling in, half formed and fragmented. I am stumbling along with only a capricious guide who shows herself just far enough along the path to urge me forward but then flashes out of sight. I can never quite reach her but she is always teasing me just a little further along.
Leaning into creativity in this way is both thrilling and vulnerable. There will most assuredly be wrong turns and dead ends. It is difficult to give in to that sort of uncertainty, and feels even more risky to share my progress as I go. It is a dance with both the future and the past. My husband will tell you (quite accurately) that I am incapable of letting anyone else lead. I don’t set out to do it, but it is my tendency to wrest control and start flinging us about the dance floor. If I am not a particularly graceful dancer I am a decidedly decisive one. This is what I am pushing against right now. As I get just a hint of a new direction my brain immediately tries to jump in and start plotting. It is excited for new paths and wants to snatch command and begin issuing orders. It is all I can do to keep it at bay and let my heart lead for a few more steps.