This morning, at our full-Saturday session with our writing Fellows at Towson U, my colleague Cheryl led us along a writing marathon, where we selected a state (wooden piece of a puzzle) from a bag and answered a few questions about home, place, and our relationship (if any) with the state that we selected. What follows is my entry, which is in many ways very telling of where I am in my life right now. Enjoy.

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I stuck my hand in an old brown Panera Bread bag and pulled out this state — Missouri, so far from my comfort zone that I am left dry of experiential springboards for my writing. It forces me to look forward and not back, look to places in my life where I have not been — but where I need to go.

When I was younger, a walker among wooded paths pitching a tent anywhere level ground afforded me a place of rest, I planned on hiking in all 50 states, placing my feet on some path in the woods 50 different times, and then capturing that experience to share with the masses. What would each walk bring me? Each step on soil that existed not for my feet but for the many souls (soles?) before and after me. The communion with the Earth, the terrain that is not yours or mine, here or there — there is humility, isn’t there? Humility in stepping off of familiar ground and venturing north, south, west — and then realizing that it is not the dirt itself that is so unique and special, it is the making of memories, of thoughts and dreams born, shared, and realized — To take you there, to bring life to such experiences is necessary to live that life loudly —

I am suddenly a Crier for movement, for the stillness and solitude that can come from such movement — the vibrancy of motion, action, as it gives birth to a settling of the soul’s mud, a rising of clarity and focus–

To move. To make the ripples that push out the detritus of a live unlived, to exhale impurities so that the inhaling of new life is possible.

We live in a life of opposites — so dependent on each other for the possibility of realizing that crystalline clarity of LOVE.