The scrawl below was part of my morning check-in and writing practice.  I used a prompt from Rob Walker’s The Art of  Noticing.   I think that the allure of prompts is that they make you adjacent to someone who knows their own practice and does exactly that…practices.  So I drafted below trying to figure out loud how I might progress with this strategy.  The idea of adjacent possibility is relatively simple:  we hop across the rocks of a stream to get to the next rock.  Most of us just pay attention to the very nearest stepping stone, but in our minds we can create a larger and webbier schema.  We can look to goal as our north star and working back and forth we can discern many possible stepping stones, many possible adjacencies in a larger set of connections.  It all starts with noticing both the goal and the myriad (but not infinite) sets of choices available.  The image below is me finding magnetic north and noting how I can get there.  It is the first step.

 

 

The next image has me separating the stones and using space and text to create, as Lynda Berry writes, both a navigation and an expedition device.

 

The next step was to confront that space above with a bit of improvisational “Yes…and” of my own.

 

 

I want to call this “improv feldgang”.  Feldgang means “field walk”, a practice I am sure all of us have in one form or another in our varied professions.  For me, my feldgang as a shepherd is to wake up zero damned thirty in the morning, put on something warm, and walk down to the barn, stopping, noticing, starting up, etc.  I could see an improv situation arising from this:  walking to the barn you hear a sound….go.

I would love to have some of my few but fine readers lead and say “Yes… and” in one form or another (poem, story, short scene, drawing, painting… Maybe we could do this and then get together on a zoom session or.  Yes, and….