What first summoned you into concentration, and inspired in you a desire to create, to build, to lose yourself in impassioned work?
Something led you to pursue, say, medical science: the desire to understand a disease; the elaborate name of a virus; the feeling of your hand on the shoulder of an ailing parent. Something summoned you.
What is it about architecture? Editing? Law? Poetry? Beachcombing? Cross-country skiing? Sculpture? Violin repair? Beekeeping?
There is something in this.
Adam sees animals in the garden — look how they crawl, slither, strut, and swagger! — and their wild beauty and variety compels him to make something of the situation. He is driven to name them. He awakens and sees the woman, and he feels an even more particular drive — not merely to observe, but to engage. Jacob has a dream about a ladder that touches heaven. Revelation. Moses walks around a corner on an ordinary mountainside on an ordinary day and suddenly a shrub is blazing without a puff of smoke, and he perceives the presence of God.
Don’t tell me our Maker is not in the words he speaks.
For Van Gogh, it was sunflowers. For Emily Dickinson, it was a slant of light dazzling gradually. For Ben Franklin, it was lightning. For Georgia O’Keeffe, the colors of the New Mexico high plains. For me, in my own humble and fumbling expression, it was this…
* * *
My Uncle Paul, teasing my six-year-old imagination, doodles cartoon figures on a piece of green paper:
Two stick-figure ants. Their bodies, vertical lines segmented by three dark spheres — two for the body, one for the head. Their eyes, tall ovals with dark pupils. Check-mark antennae sprouted from their heads. As he scribbles in the balloons beside their heads, they start telling each other jokes, short riddles and punchlines.
Watching Uncle Paul effortlessly create these characters, give them life, make them funny, I’m enthralled. It seems some kind of miraculous.
I take the paper home. I want to keep these ants alive. My parents, ever eager to see what I might do next, supply me with crayons and a black Royal typewriter.
As I follow these friendly figures into a world I call “Bugland,” the story takes on a familiar shape.
I've been reading J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit over and over again. Audacious for a seven-year-old, I inow. What was my local library thinking?
Images from Tolkien’s story smolder like embers in my imagination. That Oxford don — though he had died a year earlier — has taken me into a dark wood for frightening, exhilarating adventures. He’s introduced me to the dangers of trolls, goblins, and creepy characters in deep, slimy pits.
Naturally, Tolkien’s fantasies and nightmares inspire my story of two ants on a journey. Illustrating their adventures on the top half of a blank sheet, I then insert that sheet into the typewriter and crank the roller—crrrritch, crrrritch, crrrritch—until the illustrations have come through. Then I cast a net of words across the lower half of the page, spelling out a story in which these unsuspecting bugs pass through their own dark woods on their way to a Christmas party.
Somehow, there must be a woods full of monsters. Somehow, Christmas lies on the other side.
There was something happening here.
* * *
I had no such monsters in my home.
I lived safely and comfortably in Northeast Portland in the care of my loving parents, Larry and Lois, both teachers, both storytellers. They were as faithful to one another then as they are today, and they were similarly devoted to my brother and me. They provided everything we might need — and I see more clearly every day that they did so at great cost to themselves. I had nothing to fear.
But I did fear. I knew monsters were prowling around the borders. I saw trouble on the nightly newscast. I heard rumors of terrors.
A Boeing DC-8 aircraft crashed about three miles from my house, killing the pilots and many passengers. There were hostage crises far away in the world. During the evening sportscast, I watched Portland Trailblazers fan leap out of his arena seat in a panic. A stray cigarette had ignited his clothing, and he was running through the crowd of fans, a human torch, burning and screaming while other fans threw coats over him and tried to wrestle him down and save him.
My fellow churchgoers spoke of “the World” beyond our community of faith, and all of the evils that flourished there, convincing me that people beyond our space were some kind of enemy to be feared and avoided.
Feeling vulnerable to those prowling predators, but overcome with a compulsion to understand, I had to reckon with such threats through my imagination. Taking what few words I knew, I wrapped them around my fears to make sense of them.
Two ants crept through a dark forest. They survived by bravery, by cleverness, by looking out for one another, by carrying weapons that were sharp and ready. They endured battles, fire, flood. And when they escaped the fanged and stinging wasps, they reached Christmas on the other side.
It felt right. I grew in courage and confidence and understanding. Secluded in the safety of my bedroom, shielded from trouble’s claws by family and community, I was engaging the world by recreating it. And so the mysteries there played a part in creating me.
* * *
That’s what I’m still doing today.
I’ve been hurt. Betrayals. Failures. Nightmares. Disappointments. I’ve learned and grown by following characters through their own experiences of these things. But there have been joys and wonders enough that I have no plans for retirement.
I’m naming the animals I’ve encountered, glorious, fearsome, sometimes bizarre as a giraffe, a pilot fish, a duck-billed platypus, or even Christopher Walken.
I am awkwardly engaging great mysteries, and making something new from them — a fumbling beginner’s attempt to catch the questions that have seized my attention with threads of prose that will, if Mystery permits, flare up into poetry, and pass on something worth sharing.
* * *
"What does it mean, this thing you've done?" the book reviewer asks.
"Excuse me?" I reply.
"What's the message behind your book, Auralia's Colors?"
"Behind it?" I ask. "The message?
"Let me tell you something. My friend Anne and I were hiking through a forest near Flathead Lake in Montana. It was so incredibly beautiful, and all the more vivid and fantastic because of the signs that reported recent bear sightings. Risk, if only a trace of it. We were out of bounds.
"Speaking of bears, our conversation brought us to talk about our mutual love of fairy tales. Anne said, 'Wy do you suppose most people reach an age where they decide they're finished with make-believe? Why do most people outgrow fairy tales, as if they're just for kids?'
"Anne's question struck my heart like a bell. I knew she was a kindred spirit. Later on, I'd answer that call, and pop the question.
"But that sunny day, in my mind's eye, I pictured a city, here among the extravagant colors, in which the king and queen made colors illegal, forbidding creative expression. I saw that kingdom drained of color, turning ash-white before my eyes. I also imagined that I was looking over the shoulder of an artist whose heart was broken by the sight. This artist, a young girl, felt the call to remind those people of all they were forgetting, all they were leaving behind. She wove her colors into a revelation. She went in, knowing it might cost her everything."
Sorry, that's the best I can do. There is no message behind the story. If I tried to pull it out, I'd rip the threads. The wild beast would disappear.
There are only the questions sewn through the story, and I cannot reduce them to paraphrase. Like a dark crystal suspended in the air, the story gives me glimpses of revelation in its many shining facets.
For ten years, I wrestled with those questions. They grew from one small fairy tale into a story four volumes long. I can no sooner give you its "answer" than I could tell you what a flying Red Elephant means.
So I answer my curious questioner. "I have no idea how to answer your question. Try wrestling with it yourself for a while. But whatever it gives you is yours. And your prize will be different than mine."
* * *
We learn by imitation. From The Beatles to Bach, Monet to Martin Scorsese, J.K. Rowling to John Milton. Whether we’re watching Jim Henson’s Muppets, or standing dumbstruck before Auguste Rodin’s “The Kiss,” when we proceed to imitate work that inspires us, we bring our unique experiences and questions into the effort. Something new develops.
This is very mysterious.
But this is how we move. I reached for the Red Elephant, and soon, I was out of the crib and crawling after a whole world of wonders. Soon I was walking, but always walking in pursuit of something. Soon I was asking my mother, “But why?” Relentlessly, “Why?” Soon I was drawing bright red mysteries, and writing The Red Strand of The Auralia Thread.
The mysteries… sometimes my nets fall short of them, sometimes I catch one by the heel. They keep me humble, curious, dazzled, and grateful. Sometimes I catch something broken, and I ponder what might be required for repair. Sometimes I catch something wicked, and wrestle it in a fit of fear and fury. Once in a while I catch something beautiful and wild, and I give it a name, and it pecks me in the eye... or the wallet.
Sometimes I’m not sure what I’ll take from the struggle. Sometimes I come away from the half-written page blessed. Sometimes I fill ten pages and stagger away with a limp.
This is how I learn to love the world. The world is full of stuff, and that stuff is a language phrased into questions. When I engage and respond, I become part of the cosmic conversation. This suggests that the Truth is Out There, composing poems for me — trees, blue herons, changing seasons, constellations.
It began with a question, phrased as a Red Elephant, that was meant for me. I answered. The rest is not history, but ongoing. The rest is redemption. A love story.
There’s something happening here. “And now the ears of my ears are awake, and the eyes of my eyes are open.”
