You are here: Our lives with maps
You are here. Without maps, you would still be here, but you wouldn’t know where here is. Or there, or how to get from here to there. I don’t know when I first had this insight, but I do know that I liked maps for as long as I can remember. I started thinking about maps again a few weeks ago when my wife found a National Geographic map of Ukraine at our town’s recycling center. Her find coincided with my reading a new translation of Homer’s “Odyssey” complete with a map of Odysseus’s wanderings on his journey home from Troy.
The first map I remember is a wooden puzzle of the United States, all 48 of them when I was a kid. Each state had its own puzzle piece, and I can still remember the feeling of satisfaction that came with putting the last piece into its slot. There was a world out there beyond the boundaries of this little town with its pretty park and thrumming factories, and I wanted to know more about it. Geography class with more maps and information about the world increased my curiosity and wish to explore.
Books and movies like “Treasure Island” appealed to my sense of adventure, and I hoped to find a map with an X marking the spot of an untold fortune. Long after I had given up that fantasy, my friends and I buried a time capsule on the wooded shore opposite a lake house belonging to one of their aunts and uncles. We made our own map with an X showing us how to find our hidden cache. We never did go back, and time has long since erased the memory of all the important stuff we buried. For all we know, it’s still there, by now under the parking lot of a lakeside marina or a drive-through burger joint.
Teenage years and adulthood brought the opportunity to travel in ever widening circles from my home base. There were always maps to show the way and always that pull to go just a little farther. So here we are in Bangkok and look, according to the map, we’re only 1,458 miles from Nepal. Let’s go. We usually didn’t, but coming close was adventure enough.
Amateur astronomy introduced me to maps of the night sky. There were practical maps in magazines showing the stars, planets and nebulae that were favorably positioned to observe in that particular month. I learned how to star hop, moving my telescope from one bright star to another of lesser magnitude until I arrived at a barely visible fuzzy patch that the telescope resolved into gossamer filaments and spirals of galaxies and nebulae.
More importantly, maps of the night sky located me in a neighborhood of stars that remain the same wherever I happen to travel in the Northern Hemisphere. Under the dome of heaven, I am always at home and never alone.
Fatherhood gave me the opportunity to make maps for our children and their friends to follow at the lake where we vacationed. A series of maps, each one ending in a hiding place for the next, would lead the seeker to a treasure fit for a kid, a small toy or candy treat.
In my senior years, I am enjoying teaching my grandkids about maps as they travel from one state to another to visit family and friends. You are here. We are there. This is how we connect.
Maps give us information and directions and show us where we are in relation to other people and places. They can also be quite beautiful. When my wife and I were first married and looking for things to decorate our apartment, we found a stack of reproductions of ancient maps and mounted them on boards that we stained and varnished.
Years later, my interest in astronomy led me to beautifully illustrated and framed maps of the night sky showing the mythological figures of the constellations. These pictures are a window into the minds of the ancients imagining the characters of their stories enshrined in the heavens. They stand as a testament to the human need to make sense of the world in every era and corner of the globe. An ancient map connects us to the common hopes and fears of our forebears. You are here now. They were here then. This is how we connect.
In addition to their place as material objects with practical, historical, and aesthetic value, maps are ready-made metaphors for our development and passage through every stage of life. We can draw maps of our progression from childhood to adulthood or of any aspect of that journey. Education, career, relationships, insight, philosophical, or spiritual development, all of these and more are readily portrayed on maps.
It is easy to draw a map of a journey we have completed but much harder to imagine the road ahead. This is where we have to rely on the maps drawn by those who have gone before us, even as we know that every journey is unique. The landmarks may be the same, but roads will still diverge and storms will come and go. The outcome will depend on the choices we make and the way we adapt to changing circumstances.
Now, at the age of 77, when I look at an ancient map, I notice how much more we have learned about the location of the geographical features it depicts. As I read “The Odyssey,” I am happy to find that this new translation contains a map of Odysseus’s journey. This map gives us a remarkably good but, by moderns standards, still rough approximation of the world he traveled. Each place is a peg on which I can hang the story of what Odysseus encountered on that leg of his journey. His battle with the Cyclops and his captivity on Calypso’s island become fixed in my mind, but it is what maps like this don’t tell us that grabs my attention.
Roman mapmakers wrote it on the margins of the page, Terra Incognita, the unknown land toward which we are all sailing. We go with maps old and new, the knowledge of our scientists, the insights from our lived experience and the wisdom of our sages and holy ones. We carry these maps within us in a deep interior space, always there to guide us even as we venture beyond the pillars of Hercules.