As an angsty teen I read Robert Frost’s The Path Not Taken and would feel all kinds of profoundnesses. I would also read the bible, looking for the same depth.
I’ve liked to think I’ve moved on from such binary thinking. But I recently came across a reference to Frost’s approach to poem creation:
“It begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.”
Illustrator Debbie Mailman then references this in her book, Self-Portrait As Your Traitor. She pivots her creative process from this notion: Starting with the big fat lump and then running with it. “Start now, not twenty years from now, not two weeks from now. Now,” she writes.
I totally know the fat lump in the throat, and the ill-at-easeness that Frost refers to. It means fear. It means dread. It means things are bigger than anything our little beings have previously encountered. And we cry out, “This is not right!”.