"We make our way by walking..."  I first came across this phrase in the 1980's in my research for GUALSINGA, a collaborative dance/drama work I created with a group of artists.  The story depicted the experience of Salvadoran peasants massacred at the River Gualsinga during a fourteen year military counterensurgence program. The drama was powerful, not only for the dancers, musicians and actors who embodied the story, but also for the real life refugees who peopled our audiences.  They were the survivors; some of the 45,000 displaced from their villages and spread throughout North and South America.  The words, "Se have camino al andar," were first spoken by Antonio Machade, a Spanish poet, but for the people of Central America the words bestowed a power that impelled them to survive  to tell their story.

Some years later, in graduate school, I began working on a one-woman play, HILDEGARD OF BINGEN.  Although Hildegard lived some nine centuries earlier, there was something about her faithfulness to an unknown path in life that called forth the phrase again.  At the end of the first act, when all doors had closed to her, she picks up her skirt, so to speak, saying, "Well if I cannot see the path, then I suppose I will just have to make the path as I walk."  And she does.  It isn't until the end of the play that we see just how much this image had influenced her whole life.  "Ah, we so often fret because we must make our way through life by walking where there is no path" Hildegard says,  "And now that I am old, I can turn around to see that there has been a path all along.  Yes, God, with such humor has carved each step onto my face.  This face with its hills and valleys, is the map.  Here is the proof that I have lived,  Here is the testimony that I have loved." (HIldegard of Bingen, 1990 Michelle Belto).

I am not surprised that "making my way by walking" has appeared again in my work.  It becomes the title of the first piece in a new series working with a new media, encaustics.  When I begin the walk down a new path, it is always with the same feeling--overwhelming gratitude that after months or years of searching, I know I am finally on the RIGHT path, coupled with something akin to terror.   Like Hidegard and the women of Gualsinga, straining in the dark to seek something to light up a murky, overgrown trail, I am not given more than the next step.  It is no wonder that most artists I know are deeply spiritual people; the act of making art again and again with only the next step hazily outlined is in itself an act of faith.

And so I begin in a new direction...on a new, but also familiar path...with new expectation.  In the words of the Bard, I will now "screw my courage to the sticking point," and take that step.  Back to the studio.