Author: Anne L'Ecuyer

Anne is a writer and social impact executive who stays closely connected to an international network of creative leaders and individual artists. She writes about and trades vintage postcards at The Posted Past.

Divine Diversions

My footsteps find their own way most days, following familiar patterns on walks in the neighborhood. Room to room, too. Both GPS tracker and continuous glucose monitor reach a general truth about me, a cadence. My pace and patterns–even my blood and energy–have a signature. I move, therefore I am.

Of course, my thoughts, words and actions make up me as well. I enjoy a little Descartes, with hummus.

Aligning with the mantra, Go to other people’s parties, my task takes me beyond my usual path. Instead of being in the studio, I’ll be on a plane.

It’s the third DC flight diverted by weather since I’ve been in Arizona. I love a good ‘ghost day’ to tend to the trusty to-do list I carry around like a hip flask.

Divine diversions. There is another way alongside the familiar. Short trips sideways around the sun. Hours when you gain a year in a day. I tend to think that a journey leads toward a far away place. More often, it’s a weird turn off a side street called Obvious Lane. I plainly ought to be here but wouldn’t have arrived any ordinary way.

I expect to get a liminal nudge up in the clouds I have come to know.

Other People’s Parties

Like clockwork, the first week of my new cycle has gone off plan. Client deadlines (and a side of electrical repair) quickly pushed any creative writing off my plate. I know what I want to say but typing takes time!

Also, choosing the right words, feeling the emotions, thinking through the ethics of writing about the living and the dead, and sometimes facing the dark mirror myself. Eating, walking, and showering, too.

All that, and tend to others?

Yes, this week I’m going to other people’s parties. Another useful mantra for the new year. Creative practice most definitely feeds on distraction. For me today, that’s writing in a different voice, another purpose, a reason beyond me. Tomorrow it’s studiously inquiring about cloth wiring.

And reading a lot. What a relief to get some space from the familiar voices. I am taking the pause on my own work as a break to listen to other stories unfold.

Peripatetic Pasts

Ambling past Dad once, I noticed him asleep in his chair and also deeply involved in a conversation. His eyes were open, alive, even expressive. Hand gestures in the air, shoulder shrugs — all from the recesses of his subconscious — accidentally revealed to me in daylight.

He was young in his dreams, and with youthful objectives. Actively reliving dances and dates in low lit memories, as he occasionally reported at the sunny breakfast table later. It must have been quite lucid. I saw grimaces and cowering to suggest that the fear and shame were real in his dreams, too.

Caring for him included mastering the art of not interfering in these moments. I did sit briefly to assess. Was he talking to God or an angel or his sister? No, just lucid time travel through the universal subconscious. Well, that was Tuesday, as they say. Also, not so different from the man muttering into his collar on the Metro.

I’ll be home for Christmas… if only in my dreams.

Why do we go places (even in our dreams) to feel connected, get centered, and move on to the next chapter?

Some part of that question is answered as I walk through the studio door. There’s always plenty to do. For me, ‘writing’ includes walking, dishes, gardening, and pacing (as discussed). Am I writing a book, or not?

That requires sitting down. It is soooo hard to sit down in the middle of laundry. Better to go to the park or the patio. Of course, it’s fun and full of distraction there, too. But, also somehow a portal as real as my Dad’s dreams.

The social studio has become that space, too. Camera off, no one looking. Like the weirdness of waiting room productivity–answering mundane emails right before an oncology visit. Or worse, leaving for an errand and coming home with a puppy. You definitely accomplished something.

Leaving the familiar. Setting conditions for the unusual to occur. Old findings in new light. New facts mixed with well-worn memories. Listening for sacred signals amidst noxious noise.

What a strange path to arrive in the present with presence, and find history only now taking shape. What will set my waking dreams alight thirty years on? A new year to discover ancestral constellations in a not-so-distant inky night sky.