Getting On Your Path

Something more is being asked.

I OFFER YOU an excerpt from my new book, Craft & Current, currently launching on Kickstarter. The first third of the book is like Eudora’s One Writer’s Beginnings, and the following essay is pulled from that section. The second part is how-to. The third part is ways to create the life you dream for yourself.

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Getting On Your Path

The Rising Action

WHEN I WAS a young woman I began to look for the path I was supposed to be on in my life.

That I would be given a path but no signage whatsoever—at least none I could read—made no sense. I looked and looked.

For a while we’re lulled by being young. We think we have plenty of time. We can float. My path wasn’t obvious, and I kept looking. 

I finished college. I worked odd jobs to pay rent. Then I got pregnant. My boyfriend and I quickly organized an avant-garde wedding in a field. A few months after our gorgeous baby boy was born, we made our marriage legal at a Florida courthouse. Within another year we suffered a divorce. I was 27. 

Now I was a single parent, and still I had not found my path.

There is more in a human life than our theories of it allow. Sooner or later something seems to call us onto a particular path.

James Hillman, The Soul’s Code

The Epiphany

ONE SUNDAY AFTERNOON a few years later I found myself hiking a remote mountain track in the Andes. Silas was four years old, and I'd taken him to Colombia so I could experience the world—I didn’t want to let motherhood stop me from my dreams. But the political situation in Colombia was stressful—dangerous—and I sent Silas back to the U.S., to my parents, so I could finish two weeks left on my contract. 

I didn't want to teach English in a foreign country. I didn't even believe in obliterating a diversity of languages from the world. 

I had a kid. I needed to settle down, into my calling. But what was my calling?

I remember vividly the epiphanic moment when my purpose became clear.

That Sunday I walked alone through a bowl of tall, blue-green mountains, the road dusty before and behind. I was missing Silas although I knew I’d be with him in a fortnight.

I passed huts constructed by hand of deep-orange clay, set within small plots of peas and corn. Tropical blooms of impatiens and geranium spilled from makeshift planters around swept doorways. Children watched me. Women appeared to say hello. Subsistence farmers and husbandmen paused hoeing their terraces to pass a few words, Buenas and Cómo está?

Theirs was a beautiful, difficult life.

What was I supposed to do with my own?

I love nature, I thought, and I love writing. Nature and writing. Writing and nature.

Put them together, a voice said.

I stopped. Nature and writing. Writing about nature.

Nature writing.

I was 30. Why had I taken so long to figure that out? If I’d paid better attention, I would have known: that was my dream all along.

The Denouement

I RETURNED TO the United States, retrieved Silas from my folks in Georgia, and returned to Tallahassee, where I had been living. I knocked on the door of editor Andi Blount’s office at Florida Wildlife magazine and offered to volunteer. When the assistant editor position came open, I applied. I joined The Audubon Society. I checked out books on writing. I got the job.

Finally I was on the path.

An ornithologist friend knew at six years old that he would study birds.

For many people this doesn’t happen. Sometimes it never happens.

Following the release of my first book, after a reading in Atlanta, a short-haired, earnest woman approached me, "I'm 60, and I still don't know what I want to be when I grow up," she said. "I can see you've found your calling. How did you do it?" She gazed at me as if I were a therapist.

"You’ll figure it out," I assured her. "There's time."

Yes, she will. You will. There’s time.

I'm grateful that I received a message pointing out my path.

Everything that I’ve ever searched for I have mostly, uncannily, been able to find. Finding the thing takes longer than I think it should. The search is exhausting. I do not know exactly how it is done, but I know it starts with a feeling that something is amiss. Or something more is available. Or something more is being asked.

I also know that you have to make clear that you’re searching and get as clear as possible about what you’re searching for. If you pray, pray. And you have to believe that the thing you’re searching for can and will be found.

This whole concept of intentions and manifestations—who would believe that such a thing (in this world built on science and reason) would work, that a person could set an intention and manifest a thing? But I have seen, over and over, that it does work.

It doesn’t work all the time.

It may not work the first time.

It may take years to work—for the dream to come true, for the epiphany to flash, for the opportunity to open.

But it happened to me, and that makes me believe it can happen to anyone.

Colombia, South America, 1992

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I’d Love to Have You Back the Book

Here’s a 3-minute video and a link if you’re interested in supporting my campaign on Kickstarter to jump-start my new book, Craft & Current: A Manual for Magical Writing, and help it find its people. An influx of cash is great here at the beginning. I’m an indie publisher now, as you know, so that I can be in control of the message, the delivery, and the presentation of what I write. Publishing is costly (designing, editing, printing, marketing), and Kickstarter will help with that.

The figure I’m really watching, however, is number of backers. That’s the important figure. These are people deeply interested in this subject—stories to make a difference / stories to end oppression / stories to save the earth. This is where I’d like to see the number go up.

If you know someone else, not here with us, who thinks about writing to change the world, would you tell them about the project?

Thank you, and thank you.