Journey to the Beginning Illustration by Aedan Gardill

Each day, as I make the 30-minute pilgrimage from my desk at home to my desk at work, I am walking to the riverbank. There, I will attempt to control the direction of my progress.

Increasingly, I let the sheer force of words sweep me up in its current and take me somewhere unexpected. Like all the way back to my morning walk, wrapped in a mustard scarf and plum-red jacket. The shock of freezing air explodes the dormant sleep from out of me. I do not listen to music. I let the calls of chickadees and cardinals unhinge my humanness and pivot my attention. I pass an Ash with two well-established branches, yet it is attempting a third. Its body seems to whisper never too late to try something new. A few blocks down I spy a tree with its skeleton splattered against the sky. Its jet-black branches might have been scrawled by Shakespeare, they tell such a tragic tale.

On this raft of fresh air, bird calls, and twigs I return to my office through a new door. I feel calm – less flooded – but my metaphors have gotten badly tangled. Wandering, I have turned reality over and over in my mind, throwing it up to more abstract heights, similes metastasizing at a dizzying rate, yet still too slow to capture the plurality of any single thing.

I open my laptop. What shall I write today?