Mapmaking

I write a lot about how to get from here to there in terms of my spiritual and creative journeys. I'm always looking for the one "thing" that will reframe my life, make me diligently productive each day, or at least nudge me into the art room at night after work. Lately I've been frozen up, matching the sub-zero temps that we awoke to this morning, Doing a lot of staring at the blank page, or screen as it is.

Pulling my old journals out last night was the jumpstart to a new journey. I found a book in the stack on my night table that I am very excited about. "You Are Here: Personal Geographies and Other Maps of the Imagination" by Katherine Harmon. (It's listed below on my books typelist and you can click on it there.) The back of the book intringuely asks: "Where are you?", the perfect foil for my thoughts these days. The book is filled with examples of maps made from personal journeys, whether real or imagined.

Harmon writes in her introduction:

" As a youngster, in the bedroom I shared with my sister, I came to know
intimately the ceiling of the room where I was supposed to be napping.
I stared upward for hours, making out forms of imagined countries
in the water-stained plaster. Why was I seeing international borders
even before I knew the meaning of the concept?
***
" Of course, part of what fascinates us when looking at a map
is inhabiting the mind of its maker, consider that particular
terrain of imagination overlaid with those unique
contour lines of experience. If had mapped that landscape,
we ask uorselves, what would I have chosen to show,
and how would I have shown it? The coded visual language
of maps is one we all know, but in making maps of our worlds,
we each have our own dialect.
" I map, therefore, I am: this could be the motto for the contributors to this book. "

It sends a shiver up my spine to think of mapping out my life's journey, or visualizing the little increments of change that resulted into an overnight transformation of five years' duration. I could begin with the physical, actual journeys I've taken, our move from the safe comfort of New York to wild California with its tumbling tumbleweeds and miles of blossom-filled orchards ripe with apples, figs, and almonds. And then our segue into the mid-South, the green trees, azaleas, hydrangeas, Southern hostesses, tea partie, and garden clubs that indulged us with our fantasy house and lifestyle, and then spit us out in a nightmare of sickness and job loss. Finally, the Sisyphean push back to the Northeast and family, career, winters, noise, museums, coldness, beaches, and grime. Or I could just focus on the center of longing that fills my soul, the craving for color, word, print, the feel of silk, the fragrance of patchouli, the whisper of my father's words as he lay dying, the cry of my babies at birth, The gold of the rings we exchanged on the altar, and the way my knees shook as we said our vows. Journeys into the sparks, the embers, and the ashes.

I'll be in my studio tonight, clipping out images, tearing down paper, opening pots of paint and preparing a canvas in order to plan a trip into the maps of my world that are spinning in my mind.

What cracks in the ceiling will fill your mind this evening as you stare into the fire, prepare dinner for your mate, or lay on your bed, exhausted by the week, yet filled with the bliss of remembered lives?