A Sense of Place

Tuesday, March 6, 2007

I got a package in the mail today. The ripped open and re-taped lump of cardboard that arrived looked like a shining gift as it was placed in my eager outstretched hands. Within the box I found a ton of clothes and a book called A Sense of Place, which includes transcribed conversations with travel writers “about their craft, lives and inspiration.”

It’s led me to thinking a lot about writing, traveling and the idea of having a sense of place. The significance and reliability of the three are so interwoven in the book that I have really taken to it. Just thought I’d share a few discoveries on what some famous travel writers have derived from their experiences:

“It’s a great big huge world. Say you’d been to every single place I’d been to in my life except that you were ten feet to my right. You would have lived a totally different trip…They (Wordsworth and Emerson) said, ‘Poetry is strong emotion recollected in tranquility.’ And I said, ‘Adventure is physical or emotional discomfort recollected in tranquility.’ An adventure is never an adventure when it’s happening. An adventure is only an adventure when you’ve had time to sit back and think about it.”

-Tim Cahill, in an interview for Sense of Place

“That’s why the words ‘Let’s go!’ are intrinsically courageous. It’s the decision to go that is, in itself, entirely intrepid. We know from the first step that travel is often a matter of confronting our fear of the unfamiliar and the unsettling – of the rooster’s head in the soup, of the raggedy edge of unfocused dread, of that cliff face that draws us willy-nilly to its lip and forces us to peer into the void.”

-Tim Cahill, “Exotic Places Made Me Do It,” Outside

“Like fanning through a deck of cards, my mind flashes on the thousand chances, trivial to profound, that converged to re-create this place. Any arbitrary turning along the way and I would be elsewhere; I would be different. Where did the expression ‘a place in the sun’ first come from? My rational thought processes cling always to the idea of free will, random event; my blood, however, streams easily along a current of fate. I’m here because I climbed out the window at night when I was four.”

-Frances Mayes, Under the Tuscan Sun

“That little moment of climbing out the window is kind of the impulse: Go. And I always feel that, I feel very split always between the desire to stay, the desire for home, the desire for the nest, the desire to gather people around in the home, and that equal passion to shut the door and go, to leave it all behind and seek what’s out there. So I think for me writing partly comes from the tension between those two things. And it’s odd because they both involve a sense of place, the place being the home, the domestic, and then the place being out there to be discovered.”

-Frances Mayes, in an interview for Sense of Place

“’Fiction’ comes not from this imaginary Latin verb fictia meaning I make it up as I go along. It comes from the actual Latin verb fictia meaning, I give shape to.”

-Jonathan Raban, in an interview for Sense of Place

Oh…love, love, love.

Thursday, March 8, 2007

In honor of Women’s Day - a story about a strong Cape Verdean woman (who represents an honest mixture of the women I know):

Daybreak

She only wishes she could awake with the sun, but her almond eyes open long before the first rays of light have drifted over the crater behind her stone house. She blinks in the darkness and reaches her long slender arms toward the familiar place where she keeps the candle, and a small box of matches. One quick strike and the dark room flares up in a vision of oranges, yellows and deep reds. For a moment, the sleeping bodies of ten others on the three beds are seared into the vision of her mind. They stir, breathe deeply and escape slumber, unwillingly and with heavy bodies clinging to the lingering moments of dreams.

She grabs her thin wrap and folds it expertly around her coarse plaited hair. The Portuguese gold earrings gleam momentarily in the flickering light thrown from the flame in her careful grasp as she creaks open the heavy wooden door and makes her way slowly to the kitchen outside. Bending down over her layers of tattered clothing, she enters the cozinha de lenha (kitchen of firewood) and grabs a few meager sticks to place beneath the pot above the smoking embers. Blowing on the flame she pours the grains of coffee from a wrinkled bag and thinks to herself she is glad she had the time yesterday to pound the coffee beans into the fine substance that she depends on to will herself awake at this early hour.

The fire begins to take hold and the thick, curling hands of smoke grab her throat and beg tears from her irritated eyes. She leans low over a large bowl and pours flour and water slowly into the palm of her rough yet capable hands. She begins to knead the dough and her life once again takes the form of one who is not truly living, yet existing simply to fulfill the tasks that will see her thin muscular body through yet another day. The angular strength of her cheekbones are highlighted in the smoky light that filters through the room, clings to the strong jaw and wide, firm lips pressed in effort against the kneading of heavy dough.

While she is not yet done with her bread and the faint aroma of coffee is just beginning to overcome the smell of smoke, her husband walks in with heavy steps and prepares to leave for another hard day of work in the fields. He looks at her briefly, ignores her presence routinely and she listens as he leaves the room, trudges toward the tree where the donkey is tied, and slaps its flanks in an effort to move the stubborn animal along. In that moment, the first signs of dawn are approaching and she can hear the sounds of the tiny community awakening – roosters crowing, donkeys burrowing, voices yelling to one another in Kriolu along the cobblestone path outside.

A mixture of high-pitched laughter and argument comes from the house across the stone quintal and she looks toward the door as a tiny ten-year-old body walks beneath the thin shirts, sheets and other faded clothing hanging along the line like a long row of subtlety and surrender. She forgets her work for a moment and imagines she too is a limp article of clothing, once vibrant and now hanging low, fully lacking of color and worth. The voice of her child, now in front of her, brings her back and she nods toward a can and tells the knock-kneed shivering body to go to the store and buy sugar. The clanking of a few meager coins rattles the woman’s nerves as the child discovers the change and walks down the rocky dirt path toward the store. She stares, still lost in her thoughts, as she watches her daughter’s tightly curled braids disappear in a moment around the papaya trees along the otherwise desolate street corner…

The baby’s shrieking pulls her back to reality like the forceful slap of a belt. She wipes her dough-covered hands on her dresses and with five quick strides enters the house and forcefully grabs the writhing body from the hands of her seven-year old son. In low, guttural intonations she chastises the boy for being burro (stupid) and slaps his hands as she orders him to feed the pig outside. Her four-year-old daughter is late taking her bath and she too is scolded and told to leave immediately for the jardìm (kindergarten) down the road. Taking her baby in her arms, she finds a wrap and ties the tiny body to her breast so she can continue her work and nurse at the same time. She orders her oldest son to fetch water with his sisters who are already walking down to the well with buckets balanced atop their tiny heads and strong necks.

As she begins to sweep the dirt cobblestone outside she notices the sun is just beginning to rise and the pinks and yellows fade to a dull, light blue. She looks out over the expanse of ocean laid before her like one long, empty table and wonders what lies beyond. Leaning against her broom and feeling the warmth of the tiny bundle nestled to her breast (her sixth child, and she, only 32 years old) she imagines living a million other lives. She tries to cry but discovers feeling much beyond weary takes too much strength. And so the tears come only in the mornings, unwillingly and without allowance as the smoke from the fire burns the lingering dreams out of her eyes and she prepares for yet another daybreak.


Friday, March 9, 2007

This is something my roommate found and shared with me - I thought it worth passing along…
I Stand In Awe
Loret Miller Ruppe
In 1983, I was invited to the White House for the state visit of Prime Minister Ratu Mara of Fiji. Everyone took their seats around an enormous table—President Reagan, Vice-President Bush, Caspar Weinberger, the rest of the Cabinet, including the Prime Minister and his delegation, and me. They talked about world conditions, sugar quotas, nuclear-free zones. The President asked the Prime Minister to make his presentation. A very distinguished gentleman, he drew himself up and said: “President Reagan, I bring you today the sincere thanks of my government and my people.” Everybody held their breath and there was total silence. “For the men and women of Peace Corps who go out into our villages, who live with our people.” He went on and on. I beamed. Vice-President Bush leaned over afterwards and whispered, “What did you pay that man to say that?”
A week later, the Office of Management and Budget presented the budget to President Reagan with a cut for the Peace Corps. President Reagan said, “Don’t cut the Peace Corps. It’s the only thing I got thanked for last week at the state dinner.” Peace Corps’ budget was increased. Vice-President Bush asked again: “What did you pay?”
Well, we know one thing: it isn’t for pay that Volunteers give their blood, their sacred honor. I can never forget the sweat, the tears, the frustrations, the best efforts and successes of thousands of Peace Corps Volunteers. I stand in awe and with the deepest respect. I always thought I could be a Volunteer until I went out and met them.
I ended many speeches when I was Peace Corps Director with this: Peace, that beautiful five-letter word we all say we crave and pray for, is up for grabs in the ‘90s. A question must be answered above and beyond this special forum: Is peace simply the absence of war? Or is the absence of the conditions that bring on war—hunger, disease, poverty, illiteracy, and despair?
When fifty percent of the children die in a village before they are five; when women walk miles for water and then search for wood to cook by; when farmers leave their villages where there are no jobs to flock to cities where there are no jobs; when neighbours ethnically cleanse their neighbours, then let’s face it America, the world is not at peace.
And here at home, when fifty percent of our children live below the poverty level in many of our cities, when the homeless abound on our streets, when our nation’s capital is bankrupt and our schools require metal detectors, racial tensions abound and immigrant bashing and downsizing terrorizes loyal workers, then, let’s face it America, we are not at peace.
The Peace Corps family must respond again to “Ask not what your country can do for you, rather ask what you can do for your country.” And today, in our world, it is, as President Kennedy said, the “towering task.” We can do it!

Saturday, March 10, 2007

There is a part of me that sometimes wonders if Cape Verde is somewhere I can ever picture myself living – and here I am, living. It is strange because when you have a dream to do this as long as I have, you can’t help but have preconceived ideas about the experience. Since my eleven-year-old mind set my heart on joining the Peace Corps, I think I always pictured myself living in the lush leaves of a rainforest, much like the cloud forest reserve of Costa Rica or the sandy beaches of Brazil. I pictured myself working with the environment and living a very simple lifestyle. I pictured it fitting who I was.

I never pictured living where I am now. This place, at first, kind of rubs you the wrong way. It is rough and harsh and beautiful in all the wrong ways – so obviously it takes some getting used to. Yet what I am finding is that although this place doesn’t mirror any part of me, it is growing on me like I’d never imagined. I am beginning to love the brutal honesty, the acceptance of the way things are, the hard work, the importance of family, the struggles that require perseverance, the determination that lies behind the eyes of those who know that Cape Verde will never have enough food, or resources or jobs to sustain itself.

I am becoming used to the smells, the rough ways in which people communicate with one another, the dirt, the dryness, the wind. And what I am slowly discovering is that I have always seen myself as a fragile person – worried the petals of my exterior would whither under harsh, sunlit rays. And yet, maybe this place does mirror me in a way. Here my roots are growing and although those petals are indeed withering away, I am realizing that I am of an entirely different species. A species that drops its delicate accessories to reveal beneath a strong, deep core. It’s not a bad reflection.