Mass Migration

Thousands of Golden Sting Rays are seen here gathering off the coast of Mexico. The scene was captured as the magnificent creatures made one of their biannual mass migrations to more agreeable waters.

Gliding silently beneath the waves, they turned vast areas of blue water to gold off the northern tip of the Yucatan Peninsula. Sandra Critelli, an amateur photographer, stumbled across the phenomenon while looking for whale sharks.

For me, these photos serve as a giant Rorschach test. I not only see stingrays, in all their wild magnificence, but I see pages and pages of manuscripts just under the surface of the unconscious finding their way to writers everywhere—a mass migration of creativity and new ideas traveling to search out agreeable agents, publishers and readers. Our job, as writers, poets, playwrights, et al, is to honor our “wild” creations and the wildly creative side of ourselves.

As Mary Oliver said so well when describing a different migrating species:

Wild Geese

You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.

You have only to let the soft animal of your body

            love what it loves.

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.

Meanwhile the world goes on.

Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain

are moving across the landscapes,

over the prairies and the deep trees,

the mountains and the rivers.

Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,

are heading home again.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

the world offers itself to your imagination,

calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting—

over and over announcing your place

in the family of things.

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