Learning To Fly

I’ve started Warbler’s Journey with no clear sense of where this leads.

That feels important, first and foremost.

Lately, I’ve noticed how much energy I’ve spent in trying to decide what something is before allowing it to be anything at all. I do this with writing, with my career, with my life. I wait for certainty, coherence, permission - some internal signal that tells me that it is safe to move.

Most of the time, that signal never comes.

A blank page wields the pressure of possibility. Before anything is named or shaped, it carries the burden of everything it could be. Every possible direction presses inwards at once. The hand pauses, unsure not because it lacks skill, but because nothing has yet asked to be drawn.

Then, a line appears.

Possibility collapses into form, that which is defined and that which is yet to be. In one single stroke, the spell has been broken, and you have spoken to your canvas. Further, the canvas speaks back. A conversation begins, and you are no longer stuck in stasis.

Recently, while drawing, something simple became quite obvious to me. Once a piece is started,  it has a tendency to draw itself. Those first few lines are shaky, born from the need to know. They do not point to a subject or a destination. They are made in trust that something will respond.

By keeping your hand moving, shapes begin to repeat. Motifs appear. Curves return. Not because you planned them, but because the natural intelligence within you knows how it wants to flow.

This translates directly into the flight of the warbler.

A bird is born with both the knowledge of flight and the wings to express it. However, it is not born in the air. It begins by moving within the nest - testing its weight, stretching outward, feeling where resistance is met. The boundaries of what is known must be met before they can be transcended. The bird must look over the edge of the nest and feel the same apprehension an artist feels when meeting a blank canvas.

What if I fall? What if I make a mistake?

The edge of the nest calls to it, not in threat, but in promise of something more. And so, after beginning its movement within the nest, it meets the edge and leaps past it, into the open air of possibility. There is the fall, yes, and it is terrifying. Despite this, the bird feels its wings and knows it is meant to fly.

It is at this threshold that Warbler’s Journey meets you.

We are all birds learning to fly.