"On the Frontier" an essay by Ursula LeGuin published in "The Wave in the Mind."
This is what it's like to have grown up in Bend. LeGuin has her own pacing, but I chopped it to be blog length.
"A frontier has two sides. It is an interface, a threshold, a liminal site...
"The front side, the yang side, the side that calls itself the frontier, that's where you boldly go where no one has gone before, rushing forward like a stormfront, like a battlefront. Nothing before you is real. It is empty space ... and therefore full of dream and promise. ...And so you go there. Seeking gold, seeking land, annexing all before you, you expand your world.
"The other side of the frontier, the yin side: that's where you live. You always lived there. It's all around you, it's always been. It is the real world, the true and certain world, full of reality.
"And it is where they come...
"Coming from another world, they take yours from you, changing it, draining it, shrinking it into a property, a commodity. And as your world is meaningless to them until they change it into theirs, so as you live among them and adopt their meanings, you are in danger of losing your own meaning to yourself."
If you have to explain yourself using their words, or define yourself according to terms they understand, and forget your own words for yourself, "you are in danger of losing your own meaning to yourself."
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The other blogging moms I read are urban -- Toronto, Philly, DC -- and they never write about trees or birds or squirrels or dogs or anything, really, but humans and the environment built by humans. Why is that?
1 comment:
I love Ursula le Guin. The Wave in the Mind has some great stuff in it.
But to answer your question--I don't know. IN the old house it was because there was no nature around worth writing about. A "tree" in the front yard Frances could break. Lots of Kentucky Blue Grass. No squirrels, no animals, no birds. It was very sterile.
In the new house there's more stuff around, and it's lovely and I keep meaning to write about it, but then it always seems there's something else that should be written about first.
But I'll take this as a challenge and see if I can introduce some more nature into my writing. It should be interesting....
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