an impossibly possible project

I’m driving with the windows down and my hair down and the late August light makes everything gold, gold, gold: the asphalt, the windshields of oncoming cars, the dozen college boys who run across the road in front of me, shirtless, their skin on fire in the setting sun, to run down the green median between the traffic. The air is sweet and the traffic slow and I drive away from myself and towards myself simultaneously. I’m going to class. The first of the semester. Already my mind is like a hive of bees, bristling with ideas, with longing, with possibility.

I feel like I am in the looking glass, slipping towards an alternate view of everything that I know, everything I can imagine, be, do.

I’m wearing a blue dress and it’s just me and the quiet and then, eventually, NPR as I wait at the stoplights and I want everything to feel the way it does tonight: full with opportunity, yet not saturated with the stress that will inevitably come as deadlines press and the hours cannot hold enough. Right now, anything feels possible. This is always the way things are before you begin them. You can be anything, right up until the moment when you try.

Then it’s all about sweat and grit and talent. I’m not leaving any room for doubt.

I have the feeling that I will be coming here often with words; with the little scraps of thoughts I invariably carry around in my head; with the wonder of all of it, and the terror too. I’m the only one in the program with two small kids. The only one living at the end of a long dirt road thirty minutes away. The only one nearly bursting with words for a book. It will all be possible, right?

If there was ever a time this blog had anything to do with balancing motherhood and a creative life, it will be now, for these next two years. I'm thinking it should be my new byline: My Topography: An Impossibly Possible Project.

{grin.}

I want to remember this: just before parking for class tonight I watched a middle aged couple, both blind, navigating the sidewalk together, their bodies a dialogue of halts and movements, their dark glasses reflecting the setting sun. They held each others arms, each tapping out a path for future steps with a long white stick. They encountered the park bench, a tree, and navigated around these obstacles with a kind of faltering grace. Without sight, they were wholly devoted to the task of being present in the moment of walking.

The only place I can be is right here, encountering the unexpected with joy.

I also wanted to tell you that I'll be posting links and inspiration and essays about emergent media and design here. (But I'll also be taking full advantage of all your awesomeness here. Stay tuned. I have a project already in the works that I need your input on.)