"Beyond here be dragons"

One of my favorite German customs is the way that German celebrate major occasions: they ask their friends to make small contributions to an open-mike program--songs or poems or stories. I meant to do that yesterday, but somehow the time went by and I didn't start it, and then the time was over and we hadn't done it. Dang.

My friend Joanne sent me on email the piece she had meant to read. It's marvelous. It's about maps and boundaries and reaching out and holding hands and creating something together, something that wasn't there before.

Maps (Jan L. Richardson)

I love maps. I don't always read them incredibly well, mind you. Just last night I spent a great deal of time traveling the unfamiliar streets of Nashville because I was feeling more game for adventure than for dealing with the map. But I like to look at maps, especially the really old ones. The ones made by people who understood mapmaking as an art. The ones made before all the corners of the earth had been charted, and adventurous souls approaching the boundaries of the known world were warned by the cartographer's hand, "Beyond here be dragons." I like maps for their notion of order, for their presupposition that the lines, directions and paths they offer will show us the way if properly read. It is a heartening thought that if we study a piece of paper long enough, it will show us the way to our destination. Most of us these days live, I think, with a sense that we've wandered beyond the known world, that we're making the path as we go, with the breath of dragons hot on our necks.

I also think, though, that we come into the world with a scrap, a shred of some cosmic map in our grasp. It's lined onto the palms of our hands that emerged with us, fisted, from our mother's ocean. There are days when I believe that if we touch enough hands, place them side by side, we'll finally see the map. Across the landscape of our palms, across the terrain of our hands that come in different sizes and colors and have wrinkles or scars and are smooth or leathery with work and are missing fingers or are twisted with illness, across their flesh lie the lines that if we look closely enough are connected and will tell us which way to go.