My friends and I used to hike and run around Mt. Diablo with my High School History teacher, John Millar.  He loved the mountain and knew it intricately; the seasons for certain flowers, insects or animals, the natural pattern of streams and creeks. He even knew where, should we venture off the marked trail, we could continue to make steady progress up the mountain.  Hiking and jogging with him, we came to know the mountain as he knew it, which meant we came to know it by the names he used.

About eight hundred meters up the Mitchell Canyon was a small hill Millar had named after one of his other hiking and jogging mates.  Just over a mile up that same canyon was another trail Millar would call “White’s Canyon.” Another mile past “White’s Canyon” we would normally stop to stretch at what he called “the ball-diamond.” Of course, none of these names appear on the maps issued by the State of California. These were Millar’s names. And by these names we came to know the mountain for ourselves.

The Mountain itself was, and always will be “Mt. Diablo”; it was too special a place for us to rename it wholesale. And, of course, the terrain itself never changed because of what we called it. But by renaming its landscape we came to know and love it as more intimately ours.

I chose (and still choose) to know the terrain of life as it is named by those who have lived it and loved it before me. “The official map,” as it were, can provide a way of initially seeing where I am but when it comes to something like the birth of a child, the death of a close friend, a first major vocational success or a cancer diagnosis, the official names and descriptions can fall dramatically short. It’s all well and good to know “this is the birth of your son,” but navigating the emotional and spiritual space of such a thing has always required a more personal and nuanced naming. More than that, the many times I’ve found myself “off trail” and in places that have no official names,  I’ve benefited greatly from having the experiences of other off-trail hikers passed on to me.

Part of why I do what I do as an artist and teacher is to help re-draw maps whose names are either insufficient, worn out or missing altogether; the kind of thing John Millar and other wise men did for me.