“What will you do with your one wild and precious life?"
Mary Oliver
This past weekend I celebrated a big milestone birthday. We had a campfire party in the backyard that I called "Now We Are Sixty," my nod to this poem that I love and my mother used to read me:
Now We Are Six by A.A. Milne
When I was One,
I had just begun.
When I was Two,
I was nearly new.
When I was Three
I was hardly me.
When I was Four,
I was not much more.
When I was Five, I was just alive.
But now I am Six, I'm as clever as clever,
So I think I'll be six now for ever and ever.
I have basically stayed Six in so many ways!
I'm also grateful and proud to have made it to this milestone year and have been doing a lot of thinking about the twists and turns that led me to where I am today. Reflecting this way helps me start to see some of the threads of narrative and meaning in my life, and make more sense of it all.
I call this narrative story mapping, and it is one of the tools I use in my Sense of Place and Story training and classes. It's all about seeing the crossroads and purposeful detours in life.
Purposeful Twists, Turns and Detours
In my Sense of Place and Story classes and training, one tool I use is to ask people to look at the path of their life and map it out, or do this for someone else they are writing about.
Consider: "If I hadn't, then I wouldn't..." or "If they hadn't, then they wouldn't..." to see how every turn has created the journey.
Here's a few of mine:
I grew up in the Maryland suburbs of Washington DC. This helped me know the kind of connections you can have with nature anywhere, even on the sidewalk beyond your front door.
I got kicked out of junior high school. It was over an argument with an English teacher about the meaning of a symbol in a novel. This helped me know there's no wrong or right interpretation of what a symbol means; it's about finding what it means to you.
I was then sent to an experimental public school, which was held in an abandoned amusement park in Glen Echo, Maryland. It combined a mix of art and academics. Around then, I started playing guitar, but couldn't master reading music or scales. Instead, I found a guitar teacher who showed me chords for the songs I loved to sing. She taught me how to play every song on Cat Steven's "Tea for the Tillerman."
My local Youth Audubon Group was my saving grace at this age. It was finally where I found others passionate about learning and being curious about everything. I went to college to be a wildlife field biologist, and ended up becoming a touring songwriter, with songs rooted in a sense of place.
Years later, I gave a keynote for the National Association for Interpretation,the professional association for rangers, guides, docents etc., which changed everything. It's where I met someone from the National Park Service, who later gave me my first gig training their staff. It's where I met someone from the Trust for Public Land, who I later ended up partnering with for the release of my 2008 CD.
It was the workshops I offered as a touring songwriter and for land trusts that helped me create my core, foundational framework for teaching about creativity, writing and a sense of place.
When the pandemic hit and kept me grounded at home, I took the time to put all my tools, techniques and methods together into classes that I offered online and are still ongoing now.
One thing for sure is that if I hadn't met you, dear reader, along the way and we hadn't stayed in touch, I wouldn't have gathered this amazing community here now.
You're creatives, soul seekers, thinkers and action takers. You're centered around a love of stories, songs and a sense of place, and around caring about places and the impact places have in our lives. You're interested in living more "wholeheartedly" and wanting to make the most of your "one wild and precious life." Thank you again for reading and being part of this unique and diverse community!!!
Try This
How about you? What are some of the twists and turns in your life or someone you're writing about? Write about what happened in terms of each decade, and see if you can see things from a fresh perspective.
Interested in writing together?
December 16th-19th: Join us for a 4-day virtual program called The Gift of Story: A Winter Creative Writing Retreat. Learn more>>>