Throwing out the decoder ring
A small stack of sketchnote quotes with a rebus vibe. Plus, once upon a time, I thought I thought I would find my way making mazes and puzzles for kids.
"I did not think of language as the means to self-description. I thought of it as the door—a thousand opening doors! —past myself. I thought of it as the means to notice, to contemplate, to praise, and, thus, to come into power.” — Mary Oliver
Hello!
Thank you to those who laughed along with the story last week of the broken beaded necklace. We all need people to laugh with.
My contours this week, beyond work, were shaped by a visit from my oldest between school quarters. I am an anchor even as I am unmoored.1
Rebus puzzles, hieroglyphics, messages scratched into a wooden desk or into the back wall of a closet, tally marks, encoded notes that, at some point, had a key, a legend, or a decoder ring from the bottom of the cereal box… This week hovers somewhere in this space, a loose pile of notes below.
The cipher hasn’t been set.
Sharing unfinished things has become my habit and, maybe, a strategy. I tell myself that given more time, I would more diligently shape and finish. I would burnish the edges. I would dot the i’s with a flourish. I would tuck and trim the loose ends. I would make an index and a table of contents. I would adhere to common tenets of narrative structure, an arc you can follow rather than a looping string that winds and wraps in upon itself.
Maybe, even with infinite time, things would always be raw, unwieldy, and undone, a prism scattering light in many directions.
Mostly I make piles, constantly sorting, grouping, classifying, and drawing mental lines, shifting the stacks to make room for new piles of words and tangents and the branching network of paths. I always hope I will get back to things, have more time.
I carve a space by telling you that things are unfinished.
I appreciate seeing unfinished piles.
I appreciate the threads of a story yet unwoven, threads of something larger, something that can’t be seen all at once or hasn’t been fully discovered. I appreciate threads that shift in the light, colors changing, diamond dust embedded in the fibers casting rainbows on the ceiling.
I appreciate constancy.
I appreciate the known.
I appreciate (but doubt) the possibility of “unconditional.”
I appreciate familiarity.
I appreciate seams and frayed edges and proof of realness.
I appreciate routine and habit.
The simple list highlights a dichotomy between the safety of the known and the mystery of the unknown. Maybe all we are doing, always, is attempting to bring the unknown into the light, attempting to find ways to anchor and illuminate the threads. This is a tapestry, after all. This is a tome. This is a life. This is a cryptogram. This may be a haiku.
I am always looking for another decoder ring.
Today’s email is late. I had technical issues/failures late last night and then had trouble knowing what might have inadvertently been lost as I had been trimming and rearranging when my memory zeroed out. I noticed when things cut to paste somewhere else kept vanishing. How long before I noticed? I am glad I waited and reread with fresh eyes this morning, but doing that is always risky. There is so much more I wish I had done, more weaving and coding and puzzle-making. I probably should have just saved the puzzle-making bit entirely. This feels even more unfinished now.
It’s fine to just scroll and look at pictures. Really.
Thank you for reading.
Amy
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Week Five of 100 Days of Contours
This project is going well. The structure is simple. There is such a sameness to the figures when rendered this way. I am keeping my eyes open for interesting details that differentiate individuals, but part of what this project emphasizes is similarity.
Part of the challenge for me in continuing this series to 100 days is the very healthy nudge (or shove) it gives me to take a break now and then and leave the house so that I can replenish my pool of photos.
I am on track as I start week six. I will share individual panels in batches along the way, but you are probably already tired of seeing them, especially since they are silent. For today, just the palimpsest, which is an unexpected offshoot of the project but one that I find comforting. Don’t you want to reach out and touch it?
Making Mazes and Puzzles
The scissors have been hiding for months. I’ve resorted to the kitchen scissors for all sorts of quick cuts.
Last week, looking for something that I didn’t find, I turned up seven pairs. Orange handles. Purple handles. Gray handles.
I am always surprised at how things can get so lost and so buried and so enmeshed in the fabric of our surroundings.
Things pop up though when least expected. How many times do you search and search, give up, and then find the thing right in front of you a few days later. I often think it’s a test to see if I can let go, can just accept the “not finding” and hold the sliver of hope that, in letting go, whatever it is may simply turn up when I am not looking.
Maybe things turn up when we need them. Maybe they turn up too late. Maybe we get distracted. Maybe we move on. Maybe, in the delay, we realize we didn’t really need to find them after all.
Maybe someday we learn, really learn, to stop wasting so much time searching for the obscure thing that has wedged in our consciousness like a grain of sand in the eye. If I could only find that ink or that container of Girl Scout badges or that bag of embroidery or my birth certificate…
Maybe we should look once in the expected places, the places we thought it must be, and, not finding it, just move on.
Can we simply let go and trust that things appear when and as they should?
This wavers on the threshold between logic and naïveté. Do we really believe the universe is operating of its own accord? Do we really believe there are forces that make something lost appear? Do we really believe we can change and create our path? Or are we simply dragging a wet brush over the lines already drawn, bringing a predetermined image into being, as in a children’s activity book. Just add water.
With projects, not lost, but freshly formed, fledgling, or the product of conviction, dreams, and hope, sometimes what we can’t find is the switch, the thread, or the door.
I Spy Twenty Years Gone By
“I spy, a spool, seven arrows, a veil,
A stop light, a meter, a small sack of mail;
An alligator car, a standing clothespin,
Fifty-six people, plus a happy grin.”I Spy Gold Challenger
When my kids were little, we loved I Spy books. We had the ones about art (too simple) as well as the ones about stuff, the ones where tiny things are hidden in plain sight on shelves and in piles that are overflowing. We looked for Waldo.
My oldest loved mazes and puzzles and brain twisters of all sorts. Ultimately, we were so maze- and puzzle-obsessed that I started a puzzle newsletter for kids.2
I created all my own puzzles from scratch, brain teasers and mazes and crosswords and all sorts of pencil puzzles. It was like a homemade Games Magazine for kids. It flopped, but I loved it.
I think about it every once in a while when I run into artifacts on the shelves, a folder of notes, sketches, outlines of dinosaurs and rockets, factoids and bits of trivia, and answer keys for puzzles. I flipped through and then threw out a bunch of notes and sketches recently, accepting that I don’t need the history. I don’t need the trivia. I don’t need the answer keys. The project is long gone.3
Sketchnote Quotes
When I was looking last week for what I didn’t find, although I found all the scissors, I also found a note, a note appended to the bottom of an ordinary daily list on a scrap of paper. It is a quote about grief, a quote jotted down six years ago when grief wasn’t something I carried or claimed.4
The note is a puzzle, one I’ve tucked away in an adjacent box of words because, of course, I am aware of the winding down of the months, the spool of a year accelerating. I am aware, always aware, and I am making piles, piles I can’t sort out and untangle yet.
I found scissors (again and again) and a list with a quote, like some bit of Rosetta stone jotted down and left forgotten in a pile of scraps.
Then I found this little stack of cards.5
These tiny cards are from a 100-day project I started a few years ago (2022). My plan was simple. I was going to sketchnote a short quote each day. The project was designed to force me to create pictograms, to lean into my (nonexistent) visual vocabulary, and to find ways to represent the words and ideas with simple images.
I enjoyed the first few, but I didn’t stick with it. I obviously didn’t even get strongly out of the gate.
That doesn’t mean it was a bad idea.
I talk about this, about letting projects go, a lot because sometimes the idea that we have or that we think we will work on for an extended series is not the right idea at the time. Sometimes we discover that something doesn’t work for us, or we don’t enjoy it, or it isn’t practical. But sometimes it’s just not the right time.
I don’t know why this sketchnote project didn’t stick. When I see these tiny cards, I am charmed by them.
This little stack feels like a little bundle of hieroglyphics. Some of them are a bit raw, and the space is very small. The cards embrace brevity. They are simple. They are playful. They really are like little rebus puzzles.6
Some are hard to decipher, as first drafts sometimes are. I wonder what it would have looked like to have continued and made 100. The vocabulary would have evolved. Maybe this is something I should pick up again. Maybe this is something I should work into my weekly spread.
Really, this is partly what the illustrated journal has always been about.
One is Better than None
There aren’t a hundred of those tiny sketchnote cards. There are just a few. But just a few show me their potential.