My November, December and January were a blur of travel for family and story and art. Maine. Utah. Colorado. Tennessee. Chile. Now, I’m in the thick of a long stretch of what might be best described as Desk Time. Neighborhood walk time. Hours of staring out the window, there but not there at all. All the things that translate those months of near constant, frenetic activity into something beyond facts and action and piles of notes, and hopefully render some meaning from them that transcends my own experience.
In these quiet hours, I am reminded, over and over, just how much easier it is to lose my way when I’m sitting still. And so I tacked a map to the wall. It is a tattered half topo that marks the route to an alpine basin in Colorado. It was given to me by a friend who later died suddenly in the Wind River Range in Wyoming. He was not someone I knew well, but he was someone who I admired, and who followed my work. Over the years when I made my living almost exclusively by editing magazine stories, he would chide me gently by email. What about my own writing, he would ask. Didn’t I know that I was just as good as the people I spent all my hours helping? And that, if I gave myself time and space, I could be so much better than I was?
When I finally made the leap into freelance writing, it was him I thought of with gratitude — that he believed in me enough to help me believe in myself — and some terror — that my life would be so uncertain. Now, four years after my departure from fulltime editing, I look to the map to remind myself: Not all journeys are afield. Sometimes it is the interior ones that cast us farther into the world than we have ever been.
In that spirit, I hope you’ll enjoy this essay I wrote back in 2016, about staying oriented through reminders of possibility: “The Map Box.”