Weekly Wide-Awake: Get Out The Map

[The Stage is on Fire] is a page-turner in which, much like life, there are no easy answers and yet each step of the journey yields insight and hope. This work of heart must not be missed!

Melanie Faith

Creative Writing Teacher, Essayist & Poet.

Katie Steedly’s first-person piece [The Unspeakable Gift] is a riveting retelling of her participation in a National Institutes of Health study that aided her quest to come to grips with her life of living with a rare genetic disorder. Her writing is superb.

The Society of Professional Journalists

In recognition of receiving the Dateline Award for the Washingtonian Magazine essay, The Unspeakable Gift.

I thank you … It is the authenticity of your “class notes”; and it is the delicacy and skill with which you present the nuances of classroom life and the actuality of your students’ and fellow teachers’ lives.

Maxine Greene

Philosopher and Education Scholar

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Weekly Wide-Awake: Get Out The Map

Get out the map
Get out the map and lay your finger anywhere down
We’ll leave the figurin’ to those we pass on our way out of town
Don’t drink the water
There seems to be somethin’ ailin’ everyone
I’m gonna clear my head (I’m gonna clear my head)
I’m gonna drink that sun (I’m gonna drink that sun)
I’m gonna love you good and strong
While our love is good and young

From the Indigo Girls “Get Out The Map.”

We are moving from Miami, Florida to Atlanta, Georgia this week. We will definitely be using GPS to get from point A to point B. So, maps are on my mind in a big way right now.

I first heard Indigo Girls “Get Out The Map” in 1998 when I was about to move from Indianapolis, Indiana to Bellingham, Washington. Having spent a magical summer in the Pacific Northwest, I decided to lay my finger down in Bellingham. Within six months, I had left a teaching job and a relationship and moved 2,300 miles. Before that move, a group of friends introduced me to Ganesha, the Hindu guardian of beginnings and remover of obstacles.

Maps fascinate me. As a child, maps meant we were going somewhere on vacation. When I arrived in Washington State, I bought a satellite map of the Pacific Northwest to see the ocean and the mountains living side-by-side just to situate me in my new home. When I moved to Miami, I bought a map marking shipwrecks in the Keys because shipwrecks have become a place where new life emerges in the Florida Reef. (That feels both miraculous and hopeful.) When I was in New Zealand, feeling a whole lot of lost, I had to see the Southern Cross. Stars were maps for explorers. If stars were good enough for them, maybe they could help me find my way, too.

Linda Hogan’s poetic take on “Maps” makes sense to me.

Change is constant in life, and maps provide a few coordinates — names and order. They provide structure to chaos. They burn, dream, and wake up. Maps are there to follow when I can’t quite see the way. Satellites, careful illustrations, and stars guide. That seems important. Guidance seems important in this world where blind certainty is foolish and doubt can yield paralysis.

In her poem, “Theories of Time and Space”, United States Poet Laureate (2012 and 2013) Natasha Trethewey describes her experience going home to Gulfport, Louisiana. Trethewey’s words make me think about what it means to go home. Maps have lead me both to and away from home throughout my life.

This week was a dear friend’s birthday. A few years ago she bought me hope for the flowers for Valentine’s Day. She has been with me for more than 35 years as I have followed the nonlinear, sea to shining sea, kaleidoscopic map of my life. The book tells the story of a caterpillar who chooses to undergo a metamorphosis and become a butterfly. The map of our lives includes all our details — both before and after we become our butterfly selves — all our changes and metamorphoses.

Paul McCartney calls The Beatles “Hello, Goodbye” a song about life’s dualities. Maps help us navigate life’s dualities – the hello and goodbye, the yes and no, the up and down.

My thoughts on Joan Didion’s essay, “Goodbye to All That” ground me in the duality of goodbye. (This essay describes a coordinate on the map of her life.) The ebb and flow of experience. The in and out of love. The going to and not running from. Saying goodbye has always tasted like a bittersweet cocktail of sadness and excitement, sometimes with a twist of regret and a failure chaser. Right now, I am tired. I am not sure why I am tired. Maybe I am tired because this time has been so hard for all of us, but especially the most vulnerable, and I am just Done. Maybe I am tired because I am older and have written the change chapter so many times that I just want to close the book and simply breathe. Maybe I am tired because I am suffering a crisis of imagination. Hope, as Dickinson suggests, must become the thing with feathers and perch on my soul. I know the beauty of change and courage and fluidity in my bones. I know the beauty of “I am not yet.” (“Not yet” is where the good stuff of life emerges like bulb in spring.) I know the beauty of the inevitable call to growth we hear when we say goodbye.

I will pull out my map in a few days. “I am not yet” will sit right next to “Be still and know.” We will get out the map and we will go.