I am standing underneath a tree, the one that held a hive I never knew about until autumn flexed its winter muscles and blew the leaves that hid it off, when my friend Megan asks me, “Before I read your manuscript, can you give me some direction?”
I circle the tree so I’m standing below where the hive once hung, and plant my feet where it eventually fell. I look up. I look down. Nothing’s there, but I hear the buzzing and I remember kneeling next to the hive one almost winter morning so I could see the vacant hexagons. How do they do this? How do they know to do this? How do they know this is the exact shape they need in order to do their work?
I want to tell Megan I don’t know what all these pages I’ve spent years writing are about. I want her to set up the lines and angles – the boundaries – so I can do my work. I circle the tree and talk to Megan, ignoring what I must look like to my neighbors. None of them know I’m a writer, but I wonder if it would make a difference. “Callie’s circling trees again – must be wrestling with a story. Honey, maybe tell the kids to come inside.”
I tell Megan that the idea was that I’d write another book about teaching a story. “Except I’m no longer teaching.” I look again to where the hive once was and wonder if this summer the bees will set up camp here again. I’ve heard they return to the same spot annually, but I haven’t seen them since. What about this tree wasn’t working? Or was it that it worked just fine and they wanted to see about some other way to live?
“I don’t want to make any judgmental declarations about teaching,” I proclaim to Megan. “I left teaching. I love teaching. Those are the facts.”
Read more on my manuscript, creating a vision board and a thesis over at TSP (and begin this summer creating your own vision board and thesis for your writing projects).
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