New Traffic Pattern Ahead

It’s the juicy peak of summer, when peaches, plums and all their cousins arrive. Flowers are blooming, the sun is shining, and the threat of back-to-school is close enough that anyone who ever attended school feels motivated to get in one last squeeze. Do you feel it too?

It’s also peak construction time, more work zones than potholes, re-routing our overly worn paths in different directions, sending us new places. One sign warned me of a ‘new traffic pattern ahead’ with traffic spelled as ‘triffic’ and my mind read it as ‘terrific.’ Wouldn’t that be nice? ‘New terrific patterns ahead’?

I’ve been re-traveling the various roads of my life, so many paths defined by small choices made along the way, detour here, turn there. Not to change a thing or to linger too long, mind you, but to see how it informs this unmapped space ahead of me.

I’m resisting the ‘should do this’ or ‘try this’. Instead, I plan my environment to prompt my creative pursuits, a little more each day. Sure, I still have to-do lists, to keep the minutia at bay, to keep the bills paid. But more important are the unscheduled hours, the moment you hit open space with nothing in it. I leap into those hours as if taking my first step out on the moon, my own anti-gravity chamber where all the other hours melt away. If the laws of gravity cease here, surely our clocks can stop incessant tick-tocking.

I learn piano, hands moving in different directions while the mind struggles to let go and the heart keeps rhythm. I read voraciously, articles and books which trigger those parts of my brain that once-upon-a-time would dream with eyes open. And I write, slowly, steadily. The more creative pursuits, the more my mind rolls out a deep velvet carpet of wonder, with exploding imagery, colors, sounds and paisley swirls as it unfolds magnificently before me, welcoming me back to my own imagination.

If we’ve always had the capacity to dream without closing our eyes, why did we stop? If I had been dreaming with my eyes open when I hit prior crossroads, would I have imagined more limitlessly? More fearlessly? I vow to not let gravity bind me to someone else’s path, I vow to eye-open dream from now on, no stopping. 

I remember childhood paths along creeks and rivers, so many twists and turns, the gurgling across slippery rocks, wet socks without a care, or sometimes no socks, shoes left behind. The river laughs, encouraging each bare foot to bravely move on. Feet splash into the chilly waves, toes wiggling past wee little fish, green algae strands nodding and stroking the calves, as if to say ‘keep going’. 

Here a sharp turn, there a gentle twist and then a long, slow patch. Feel the clay in your toes – and what’s there, a small bank that requires a scramble, use your hands! And at the top, a field of grasses in full bloom, singing with a chorus of crickets and kissed by the sun’s gentle shine on dew drops. Glittering stalks in all directions, waving, with a small pine wood a bit to the left and there straight ahead, it’s open as far as your wide-eyes can see, all the way to the blurry line where the earth vanishes into space. And oh! What a terrific pattern you can make here.