I was not, of course. And I am.

The concept of The Threshold Project came to me quickly, I think precisely because I am ready. The specifics of carrying it out have surprised and challenged me, and I’m sure they’re not done.

I got to the first installment through a dream. I don’t remember details. I have a sense of floating fragments—sharp and strange ones, so maybe the better word is shards. Possibly this was all induced by an uneasy turn in the weather a few nights ago.

Anyway, I woke up shaping something in my mind. I went looking for materials to give it physical form, and the form changed. Shaping itself to what my hands encountered, maybe.

(This is one way I know I’m in the flow of the process. This feeling isn’t confined to art. But art reminds me it’s a beautiful way to live.)

I wandered through my vintage postcard collection. I might have been thinking about place and memory, and how we shape them to our experience and our purpose (like a piece of art). And then some old magazines I brought home who-knows-why. There was a photo of light reflected on a polished wood floor. And then I knew what I was making.

I don’t often begin with a title, but in this case it gave me the frame I needed.

Starting here, what do you want to remember? ...

I had the idea that I would do each installment of The Threshold Project in approximately a single day. 6 weeks, about 6 days of actively making art. Enough commitment to get inside the work, not enough to take over my schedule.

But of course once I spread out materials and ideas, my hands are doing much of the thinking, and my body is reconfiguring and thinking like that too, and time—which I tend to preconceive—also reconfigures.

Which is how I ended up with a moderately large collage in three parts, each of which took an afternoon. I have to give time, and not think of time while I do it. And it’s not just making the work; there has to be space around the work. Art teaches the rightness of time between things.

(Which does make me wonder: triptychs, seriously?)

It’s not that art doesn’t like schedules. I absolutely believe creativity thrives inside modest constraints. But it does tend to change the meaning of things, schedules included.

I’m thinking a lot about how much space there can be inside a life.

I mean that positively, as in: spaciousness, expansiveness, ease. Space inside the movements of the moon and sun. “…A space inside the ocean breeze.” Space inside the hours I’m no longer committed to a public and visible identity.

Which I loved. Did I mention I’m not a small-town librarian anymore?

Strange to say it. I left. And I’m glad, of both the loving and the leaving.

I think in visual memory a lot lately: full-color, saturated images of places I have loved. Often these are superimposed on my present view without warning. That sounds intrusive. But they don’t disturb where I am or what I’m doing. They’re just…companions. I’m always glad to see them. Perhaps the postcards that surfaced for this triptych are a nod to them. A thank-you.

I don’t know what these images are about. They’re unique in my experience. I do know that they began around the same time my sense of a future collapsed on itself.

If I’m recalling correctly, that’s about 2 years ago. Before I was found by this specific little fold of the north coast. Before I was given the temporary stewardship of a beloved branch library here, gave my everything back to that charge—and then relinquished it. And before I was given the gift of this wonderful community of humans, around whom I feel—this is also unique in my experience—very much home.

I have so much for which I am grateful.

Something else: that sense of a future—that faith? that trust?—is back, as of not long ago at all. It’s nothing so clear as an image, and it doesn’t have a name. It seems content in that state, for now, gently shaping. I think I can learn to feel this as an invitation.

Starting Here.
What Do You Want.
To Remember.

---

You Reading This, Be Ready

Starting here, what do you want to remember?
How sunlight creeps along a shining floor?
What scent of old wood hovers, what softened
sound from outside fills the air?

Will you ever bring a better gift for the world
than the breathing respect that you carry
wherever you go right now? Are you waiting
for time to show you some better thoughts?

When you turn around, starting here, lift this
new glimpse that you found; carry into evening
all that you want from this day. This interval you spent
reading or hearing this, keep it for life –

What can anyone give you greater than now,
starting here, right in this room, when you turn around?

—William Stafford (from Ask Me)