The long-winded,
ever-winding prompt:

From Wikipedia:

A map is a symbolic depiction emphasizing relationships between elements of some space, such as objects, regions, or themes.

Many maps are static, fixed to paper or some other durable medium, while others are dynamic or interactive. Although most commonly used to depict geography, maps may represent any space, real or fictional, without regard to context or scale, such as in brain mapping, DNA mapping, or computer network topology mapping. The space being mapped may be two dimensional, such as the surface of the earth, three dimensional, such as the interior of the earth, or even more abstract spaces of any dimension, such as arise in modeling phenomena having many independent variables.

Although the earliest maps known are of the heavens, geographic maps of territory have a very long tradition and exist from ancient times. The word "map" comes from the medieval Latin Mappa mundi, wherein mappa meant napkin or cloth and mundi the world. Thus, "map" became the shortened term referring to a two-dimensional representation of the surface of the world.

A prompt to make a map or map a make or translate or mark or map.

A map, then, too, a kind of prompt.

Do you walk or wander? Observe? Hang on your wall? Remember a place you found one time? Try to find it again in your mind. How do we move in times of mandated stillness? How do you still your heart held in body held in a palm in a square? In a tide?

And what are we prompting?

Perhaps new modes of living, connecting, creating, being with, marking. Perhaps revolution. Perhaps hands extended to once again allow the touch of another hand, a face.

The world on napkin or a cloth. Tossed aside, burned, or treasured. Crinkled, wrinkled, crumbled, humbled.

Framed and hung on a wall.

Gathered into An Atlas to be shared and interpreted among friends.

Oxford English Dictionary claims an outdated informal definition of a map as a person’s face. Googling this for other sources proves difficult. Results for facial recognition and mapping crowd the results. But more methods of mapping to consider...

Within constraint, we can grow large. I like this about our written language. We are taught throughout grade school all the rules of grammar, the structures, the do’s and the most necessary of don’t’s. Bing bang bongo. Thesis evidence reputable sources conclusion. I am learning and still learning and re-learning and learning yet again to break the rules, to love settling into the cracks of the structures. A massive ground to play with others.

Maps are tools for discovery. Seeing things differently. Uncovering. Connecting.

Maps are guides through uncertainty, tools for planning, relics of a past before devices kept you from getting lost, documents of imagination, representations. Holding secrets in their wrinkles and collecting .... in their folds.

A body of marks; marking bodies: bodies of water / bodies that water / tears, collecting to flow into the soil, sucked up by roots of sprouts to grow. An awareness of our bodies in space / the spaces we occupy / the space within / between / dissolve. You never really press into another body anyway: how I long for my hand to collapse into you, but physics denies us. Defying the constraints or denying: choke me to prove this body wrong. Contained like ocean - never fully something always somewhere else.

What is a map of a room? Of a lover’s body? Of a memory? Of the walk you take each day? A map connecting your loved ones through these impossible distances. Six feet holds lifetimes.

Can we reimagine distance? Distance not as measurement, but... how far does it feel? Is a centimeter six feet or miles when you can’t hear a heartbeat?

Maps are never really accurate. How does a map change your perception (or vice versa)? Can it guide you within? What does it reveal? When the walls stop confining us - is there boundary to the space you breathe into? How can constraints foster expansion? Where are you expanding? Are you uncomfortable? Where do you feel it? Can you breathe into it?

What is the map of the enormous space contained within our bodies, even what is held in a single cell? Dissolving boundary between container and what is contained, to become indistinguishable. If walls are not limits, we breathe into beyond.

To consider scale, legend, color, feeling, space, change, boundaries, capillaries, caterpillars...

Make a map of your room, your home, your lover, your family, the walk you take each day to ground. A map connecting you to all the people you wish you could hold right now. A map of your experience of space, place, connection in this moment. Mapping of your movement within your space, under sudden uncertain, unusual, and unexpected constraint. Anymore inside is not separate from outside:

Drawing a jagged line connecting shrapnel of orange I found on a walk around the neighborhood today. A straight line jagged like zig-zag holding the weight of the contradiction in its form, and an idea doesn’t have to be loyal to itself. To begin and then we learn never line here then somewhere but not straight.

Maps are suggestions.
Please don’t tell me what isn’t. Then all things were possible.

Maps are interpretations. Marking changes over time. These maps are open to interpretation. Use a map to direct you in a random location. See where you end up. Prompt.

What are we prompting?

“without regard to c​ontext​ or ​scale​”

What does the map of the changing landscape of your hands look like? The small bloated hands of Baby-You, reaching for what Baby-You needs without language to reinforce. They grow. Your own small hand within your now-larger hand: dredging deep now, with honey in the rivers folded into the cracks. Can you see your veins now?

And now? Washing for the length of some chorus twice through of some song that reminds you of being a kid in the 90s. Your hands now, red now, aching now. Cracking the landscape - rivers with dry banks, filling with blood streams. What burns now on these banks?

What is the remarkable aching distance between your desert palms and your lover’s face?