Look down at your hands. A simple instruction. Now, close your eyes and look down at your hands. Imagine that you write about a person who cannot see. Your person has just set foot on a trail they cannot see. And they are determined to walk on that trail. The details you bring to this story are their eyes and their ears. Their capacity for scent and taste and touch. Their map. Your map.
You can go beyond imagining. Ask a friend to walk with you in an unfamiliar place. Tell them you will close your eyes and they will guide you. You can choose the place – or to deepen this exercise, let them choose. There is no point in simply thinking about doing this – or trying to imagine it. By walking with your friend with your eyes closed you will create a map. And, should you repeat the blind walk a few times, you will feel that map within your feet and legs, within your entire body.
Later, write what you experienced: The air smelled green and was cool on my face. A bird chittered somewhere off to my right. A truck climbed the long stretch up to my neighborhood. My heart pounded. Not because of the truck. Because of…
***
I invite you to send me your writing every time I post a Breakthrough. In the last ten years, perhaps four people have done so. I’m sad and angry at those numbers. We are in this together. I learned years ago about a Japanese practice of writing poems on paper and folding them into little boats. The poet sets fire to their boat-poem and floats it out on the water of a stream. I have no interest in doing that. I am eighty-two and three/quarters years old. I don’t have forever. You won’t have me forever. You won’t have yourself. All we have is now. Now. At a time when Now slips away faster and faster from all of us.
With respect, Mary
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