My Place

This is a story about the power of story--how one family unveils (sometimes painfully, sometimes comically) its own generations-hidden history and comes together in the most beautiful way.  It centers around Australian Aboriginal culture, which after my research into Dreamtime and my roommate's recent return from that very place, seems more than coincidence (although I think I've stopped believing in coincidence and starting believing in co-incidence).

It's also about the power of place--something I've been thinking about very much as I've come back to live in the region, if not the exact area, where I feel more or less native; as I've been contemplating the seasonal cycle which has imperceptibly become a part of my own rhythm as I've grown older--or perhaps shaped that rhythm; as I've made my home more transient than ever before yet at the same time more rooted in this soil, literally and figuratively; as I've experienced what I can best describe as an ever-so-slight sort of culture shock every time I transition between Wilmadelphia and Philmington.

And it's also got a strong-woman-strand woven throughout.  The men are typically either absent from the narrative or absent from the family, with few exceptions.  It makes me, in light of many could-be-seen-as disappointments with the concept of harmonizing my life with a counterpart of the male variety, realize that while I still want that kind of partnership, a life intertwined with some awesome women would do quite a bit to fill up the ever-expanding vastness that is my heart.

It was especially interesting to read this after Tom Robbins' densely packed, metaphor-ridden prose (which I found out is written sentence by sentence with little or no revision, a process that takes about a day per page).  Here, the individual sentence structure and metaphor were second, by far, to the very act of storytelling.  So my selection of quotes is a bit thinner, but nonetheless worth a ponder.  I don't have page numbers on me; I'm in one home and the book's in another.  Here goes:

"You never heard anything special unless you were very quiet."

"Let me pass this way but once and do what good I can.  I shall not pass this way again.  Maybe someone else is walking a road that's like mine."

"Our lives fell into a pattern." (I've been thinking so much about pattern lately--culture and meaning and pleasure and ornamentation all wound up together into something like making sense of why we're here)

"Someone's got to tell, otherwise things will stay the same."

"One day, the place would be desert, the next day, green and gold everywhere."  In the context of the book, referring literally to the landscape, but also seems to reflect the natural ebbs and flows of the thinking-person's life, the cranial landscape if you will.  Or even if you won't...

"In my heart, I heard it."  The only place we can really, truly hear anything, I'd say.