Here Be Dragons

While I appreciate the wanky geographic muscles of Google Maps--especially as I enter a city new to me--I will forever love the feel of its analog cousin, the accordian-fold map, stretched out across my lap.  Running my finger across its well-worn surface, I feel like an explorer, pondering the infinite possibilities before me.

Terra incognita ("unknown lands") is the term early mapmakers gave to those otherwise unexplored areas.  Sometimes, they filled these spaces with fantastical, out-of-place animals--strangely-shaped elephants or lions.  Some were even said to include the phrase "Here be dragons" in the otherwise blank space.  It is strange to look at one of these early maps of a now-familiar place, the outlines smudged or simply not there.

Every map, though,  is a fluid representation, a best guess of what it is that is before us right now.

And where is it that we are right now, the once-confident edges of our known lives losing their hardness?

Hunkered down, awaiting the slow, menacing wave that grows towards us, our maps are unspooling. Unnamed days run together, and we find ourselves taking our cues from nature--the angle of the sun, the early song of the robins, the shocking pink of the first tulip unfurling in the garden.

We are making new maps these days, erasing the familiar and replacing it with Terra Incognita, lands unknown, stretched across the now-emptied spaces.  I think I will use a pencil and write lightly, drawing these new landscapes with love and care, knowing that their contours will continue to evolve.