When the Daily Line is Drawn in the Sand

Getting serious about stuff when stuff is serious

I make lines every day. It’s how I bring things—poems, paintings, designs, books, lessons, stories—into existence.

Naturally, lines originate in synaptic lightning and are inspired by the stimuli that enter my senses by looking, hearing, reading, jumping around, or interacting, but until externalized by physical action onto some sort of surface, they don’t actually exist.

A line is a do, not a think.

I love typing on computers and typewriters. When I’m on a roll my fingers fly like Riverdance feet.

I love a good fine-line pen like a Pilot BP-S or a Faber-Castell PITT artist pen. Also any of the mutts I’ve picked up over the years in hotels, at banks, or from anybody’s marketing cup at checkout. There’s exhilaration in my arm and finger muscles as ink flows and lines appear in the wake of the nib.

I love pencils, graphite and colored. The friction of a sharp point against the tooth of good paper is immensely satisfying. So is the bumpy, mottled sweep of shading with the broad side of a pigmented core.

The lower tempo of manual production techniques, as well as the fact that resulting marks are a little harder to obliterate than tapping delete or backspace, causes me to give each line a few milliseconds more consideration before committing to it.

There’s value in that pause.

It’s a good space for the next question to materialize, the next idea to articulate, or the next choice that will lend direction and order to the flurry of ideas begging to be given form.

Sand

In this cultural moment, language and images fly in every direction at once. By culture I mean all of it from art and family to politics and technology. Familiar practices of interacting, managing, idolizing, manifesting and surviving as humans in society—things we’ve made—can be unmade.

The air around me is full of debris. Failure to access and interrogate reports about demolition and resistance is no haven. Grit gets in my eyes, mouth and mind. It scrapes the polished surfaces of beliefs and impairs the machinery of communication between real people everywhere about real things anywhere.

Maybe you’ve experienced the sandstorm?

I experience the friction of swirling things like static electricity. Meaning that I can’t always know, when I reach through the haze for a person, whether I’ll touch armor instead of flesh and get a zap.

It’s enough to make the hands go still.

Photo by Artin Bakhan on Unsplash

But making lines is what I do, and I will not be still.

Being Scrappy

Deciding when, how and what to do about the storm is a great big honker of a challenge, though. Whenever I say or post something that isn’t on brand for me—wise or witty things about words and creativity on The Daily Lines, spiritual spunk on Outside Church, my peculiar personal blend of aesthetic scientificalism on other media channels—it feels like I’m drawing a line in the sand—like setting a limit not to be crossed, fully anticipating that it will be read by some as solidarity and by others as a target.

I’m a big fan of people getting along.

But these are not days in which lines, especially those drawn by women, are globally respected. If I make a visible line, it will be challenged. And I am not a trained or high-endurance fighter.

I know some good ones, though. Amazing poet journalist activist homesteader Laura Grace Weldon. Amazing author activist advocate professor Sonya Huber. And I know of many more, chief among these, historian observer chronicler Heather Cox Richardson. Compared to their force, their consistency, their acumen, judgment and gumption, I often feel that I’m drawing lines in the sand in the air.

But Seriously?

Every line counts. Every line is either the achieved result of a creative process or, it’s a maneuver in the process that leads to the next line that I couldn’t get to without having made the prior. When the best lines I’m capable of are deployed into the discursive battleground of warring cultures, they will help move the front line by some degree. That wouldn’t have happened if I’d sat on my hands.

So I’m going to keep making lines. And among them will be lines about serious things like systems, conventions, injustice, and fear.

My best weapon is the question mark. It’s mighty in the same way a profane word or expression has highly-designed impact requiring a couple sorts of buy-in by both speaker and listener. But it vibes in palpable ways. That hook form lets it snag other questions and enchain problems with bigger and bigger questions until answers must be given.

My shield is the ampersand. For anything that ‘is’, there’s another ‘is’ out there somewhere, whether or not it’s made an appearance in your neighborhood, education or social media feed. If you’re uncertain about this, just test the effect of writing something down and putting ‘and’ right after it. You may magically attract the second element, the unfamiliar with links to your familiar. Your understanding of the first will be amplified and expanded by discovery of the second. Efficiently enough, question marks also have the capacity to open space on the right side of &.

My courage is the doodle, the noodle, the moodle, the sketch. As each draft materializes into existence, morphs, opens to admit both intended and unforeseen movements, and transitions from the leapiness of thought to the linearity of reading, conviction and momentum grow. Soon enough, the lines coalesce to become a newly-created thing, my armor.

I unapologetically hope it gives off sparks—the kind that illuminate, but also shock a bit to anyone who’s been shuffling their feet.

Be well and keep writing!