The path follows you.
A prompt & announcement for you this week.
My dad took this picture of me in 1999 for my senior photos.
The quotes this girl chose for her senior yearbook were from Ani DiFranco (no surprise), Gandhi (sure) & one from Spanish poet Antonio Machado: “Caminante no hay camino, se hace camino al andar”—“Traveler there is no path, paths are made by walking”.
Interestingly, “Paths are made by walking” is also attributed (though I cannot find a citation) to Franz Kafka, one of Machado’s literary contemporaries writing at the turn of the century in Prague.
Now, I am neither a Machado nor a Kafka scholar, but I am a poet and I’ve been thinking lately about them both thinking about this idea then.
Each born in the late 1800s (just a few decades after the Industrial Revolution replaces human labor with machines & forever changes the nature of work and the speed of profit), the path these creatives are walking is through a volatile landscape of rapid change in all directions (sound familiar?)…
This list leaves out a lot of global context, but contemplate with me these points from their general quality of time—
The South Pole is “discovered”, Carl Jung is working on the collective unconscious and Aleister Crowley is doing his occult thing, labor movements are fighting for things like minimum wage & child labor laws (and being violently opposed by those in power profiting from exploitation), the last Chinese emperor (a six year old) is forced from the throne to make way for the rising Communist party, intense nationalism is the mood of the day all over the place, World War I kills over 17 million human beings in a few short years and, thanks to the advent of film and proliferation of photography, the populous sees image after image of the unspeakable carnage with their own eyes for the first time in history…
So, sure. How else do you “find your path” in a destabilized present with no certain future but to put one foot in front of the other and make it up as you go along? Teenagers get that. And I like that both of these writers at the same time in history came to the same conclusion.
By now it’s a sentiment that’s circled around the memetic internet enough that it can read as kind of trite (like, sigh, everything). But just the stickiness of this concept seems a testament to folks’ craving for some confirmation-of-rightness when chaos reigns. Tell me I’m not completely fucking lost & that this aimlessness all adds up to something… This all suggests to me that humans have been reminding one another that paths are made by walking since long before the 20th century. This is a deeper story.
And it’s a story I circled back to last fall in my Image Word Mystery class sketchbook, which I dedicated to myself at 17.
May I know you as we fly
by the shape of the space between us shifting.
Grace in the falling & the lifting
I know now what you knew then:
Paths are made by walking, walking.
Grace in the falling & the lifting
I’ve stopped before I’ve begun before, but
paths are made by walking, walking
and my feet are moving still.
I’ve stopped before I’ve begun before, but
roads spill out in all directions
and my feet are moving still.
And the journey alone is perfection.
Roads spill out in all directions.
I know now what you knew then
and the journey alone is perfection.
May I know you as we fly
by the shape of the space between us shifting. (LM 2022)
So why am I circling around all of this right now?
I’m thinking a lot about those themes that spontaneously emerge between creative minds who are steeped in the same quality of time. And I’ve been thinking about the things we decide to pick up and walk with creatively.
The Image Word Mystery course traded heavily in both of these preoccupations. Through many rounds of creative prompts and improv games we got really abundant with un-edited output. Then we made another game out of listening to one another closely as we shared our work & took notes on the interesting themes that we noticed emerging from the group.
Effectively I said to my class: Let’s court the fertility of chaos. We won’t know what we’re making until we’re making it. Paths are made by walking.
One of the ways the class kept walking with those deeper collective symbols that emerged was by capturing them in home-grown oracle cards. Starting the course with a simple stack of blank index cards, over the 10 weeks together we each generated our own deck of evocative symbols to play with. Then we used our handmade decks to generate more poetry, more imagery, and spiraled further into meaning-making together. In this way, themes that spontaneously emerged from the group on the first day of class made their way into the nooks and crannies of our work downstream until the origins of ideas became uncertain and irrelevant.
A doorway, a shadow, a chair wrapped with vines, the feeling of willfully falling…
By the end of our time together I had generated 42 cards. Now, I am picking them up again and walking with them to new horizons (and in doing so, circling back to a project desire I first named 5 years ago):
I am animating the oracle deck.
In the spirit of Image Word Mystery, I am gamifying this next chapter in my quest for meaning-making: I’ll let the hand of fate determine the order I work on the cards by pulling them from the deck one-at-a-time. Then I’ll be taking a deep dive into the imagery, investigating the symbols and themes from every angle, taking them apart then recreating them using one of my favorite art forms— meditative, animated loops.
I’ll be bringing my paid subscribers along on this plunge into the waters of symbol and inviting your input & resonant insights into the deck’s creation. There will be history. There will be discovery. There will be rabbit holes. There will be poetry. I’ll bring you deep into my sketchbook and invite you into my meta-process as a loop artist who constantly asks, “What’s worth repeating?”. The 42 cards in my original deck will constitute the initial capsule of the digital deck project, but who knows what else will come through? Then I suspect someone will emerge from the ether to offer me the path forward with this body of work… Who knows how I can make this into an app? Paths are made by walking!
A Prompt For You:
Consider the general quality of time in which you’ve been alive. Set a 5 minute timer and let yourself brain-dump onto the page: world events, overarching themes, global changes, movements, stagnancies, buzzwords…
Review your writing. Feeling into this quality of time, what *one symbol* might stand out to you as particularly relevant? Particularly loud? Particularly of-the-moment? Is there one word that stands out? One big idea? Using a blank index card (or some paper you cut up, or a box you draw in your notebook to represent a card…), create an oracle card of your own that hints at that deeper theme. Then, give the card a title. Comments are ON for you to share what comes through!
Bonus: Live with the card somewhere visible for the next week so you can contemplate it. Ask yourself things like, “What is the opposite of this card?”, “What else does this card apply to?”, “What are the positive and shadow sides of this card?”, and “What might be an alternate title for this card that changes its apparent meaning?”
This longer post has been building over the last couple weeks in which you haven’t heard from me. For those who noticed: I appreciate your patience! Free prompts will continue in their mostly-regular cadence now that I’ve freed up some energy to devote to these words. Thank you so much for joining me here- I love it.
Peregrinate.
Wow. There is so much richness here to walk with, thank you Lisette for the context and observation of 'quaility of time' ✨🕯️🙏💛