The Beauty of Back and Forth

“March comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb”. It’s a weather report and a poem in one small package. Part of what makes it so catchy is its dynamic opposition; it offers a roaring lion and a gentle lamb, as well as the actions of arriving and departing.

Now that I’m commuting to campus again, I’ve been re-learning the value of back-and-forth movement not just for poems (where line breaks move the readers’ eyes back-and-forth, where pauses work with the in-and-out of our breath, where images and sound patterns draw our attention to a synesthetic harbor somewhere between the visual and the auditory), but also for the imagination itself.

There’s something about moving between indoors and outdoors, between home and world, that invites the mind to be a little more permeable—to blend mood and weather, to notice the robins landing on a fence post while I listen to a news report on the war in Ukraine—to dwell simultaneously in what’s real and what’s possible. There’s something about occupying liminal spaces like bridges and parking garages that seems to draw subconscious ideas toward the surface. My commute is an invitation to braid together thinking and feeling, remembering and planning and those rare (for me, anyway) moments of being fully attentively present. Any kind of back-and-forth journey—even a walk to the mailbox or a row of knitting—can be a chance to drop in to this both/and territory.

The creative spark isn’t an external bolt from the blue or a precious flame dredged from deep inside the writer. It breathes and moves in the space between self and other, between rest and work. This feels especially true in March—when I meet warm breezes and freezing rain on the same day, and find my mind shuttling between winter and spring.

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