On an elementary school field trip, we kids were each given hand-held mirrors to use on a nature walk. Our guide encouraged us to use the mirrors to explore the tree tops and imagine what it was like to move amongst the leaves and branches waving high above our heads in the clear blue skies. This was revelatory to me. To be between two skies at once, one above me and one held in my hands, created a delightfully disordered sense of balance and navigation, and opened, in my childhood imagination, a world of possibilities. This exploration of my environment through mirror walks became a regular practice of mine that I never let go of.
In the early days of the COVID-19 lockdown, I returned again to mirrors for a sense of imaginative possibility. With just my dog by my side and the moon outside my window, I sat on the floor of my Brooklyn apartment with a piece of wood my mother had found on a walk in the woods surrounding my parents’ Ohio home, a small handheld mirror, a 4”x6” sketchbook, and a few drawing materials. Placing the mirror against the wood at different angles, I created little landscapes, portals I could pass through via the process of drawing. This connection with childhood, with the feeling of movement despite having, just as in childhood, limited ambulatory agency, helped me to find a sense of expansion when the world seemed so fearfully fixed in place. The imagery took on qualities of the moon, and I once again found myself awed by the feeling of holding a little piece of the sky.
