How often do I explore? How often do my footsteps create their own path, unguided by sidewalks, stairs, or hallways? Even when I take the time to wander a nearby wood, my way is directed by the paths made by others, in order to diminish the effects of my weight on the life processes of the wood's inhabitants.
There have been times in my life when I was afraid to leave my home. Not a concrete fear of violence or oppression, just a dull anxiety that keeps me cooped. Curiously, those times tend to correlate with the weeks after moving to a new place. Perhaps I need the time to explore and feel comfortable in my new home before I can even think of exploring its surroundings. But at the time, I never think of it that way. I think "What's wrong with me? Am I depressed? Am I developing agoraphobia?" I hear about events across town, think about how many people I will have to encounter, not just there but en route. I tell myself to stop being such a baby and I but on my coat and boots, then continue pacing around finding little activities to delay my departure. Even when the environment inside my home becomes a cacophonous soup of practicing musicians, grinding power tools, and room mates laughing around the kitchen table, to the point where I need to escape more than ever, I imagine myself trapped. Instead of walking downstairs and out the door, I jump under a blanket and try to drown out the noise with darkness.
Is it because I know that by walking outside, I will be replacing one striated cacophony with another? Escaping an overly amplified performance to an avenue of sirens, honking, shouting, and helicopter wings. Escaping the geometrical restraint of indoor architecture full of someone else's stuff into the grid of pavement, brick, and regulation. Either place I go, my path is predetermined.
For years, art has been my realm of exploration. The mind is substantially striated by culture, tradition, and genetics, but the act of art-making can allow one to break out of the grid, if only for brief moments.
But the inner realm can become its own prison. when after hours in a studio, I suddenly look up and realize there is a whole world outside.
So what do I do?
Read.
I read about the explorations of others. I watch nature documentaries. Like the suburbanite I was raised as, I pretend to satisfy my exploratory desire by staying comfortably at home and consuming endless packaged goods of ideas. Why don't I just take some trail mix to bed and watch a Lewis and Clarke documentary. Just like the bookstore owner in Neverending Story suggests - "Those books are safe." When I finish pretending I am Craig Childs standing face to face with a mountain lion, I get to be a little girl again.
Then the truest fear grips me - the one that causes middle aged men to buy convertibles. What if I die having never walked without a trail or a map or a goal in mind. What if my last breath is wind on the pages of a book about animals, instead of commingling with the scents of them. What if I die having only read and made art about the creatures I admire so much without having ever experienced them outside the frames of page edges, aquariums, or fences, and without having made any true effort to aid their survival in the midst of certain obliteration by the progress of my species. No one will care if I die like that.
When that fear sweeps over me like the arctic wind I have never felt on my fur-lined cheeks, that is the moment I walk out the door.
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