Assignment: After reading Barbara Kingsolver's essay, Knowing Our Place, respond with your own creative piece regarding place. Choose a geographical location that was important to you in childhood, describe this location, and explain the importance of that space for you.
Everybody has some place, some place in their childhood which affords them escape and imagination. Sometimes adults consider these places insignificant, silly or foolish.
I guess what the adults don't see is the happiness that places like these brings to the wide open eyes of a child... Perhaps the adults, due to their hectic lifestyles, have eyes which have begun to droop with drowsiness, and are no longer the sparkling jewels that allow for other worlds to float in and out of consciousness
unscathed.
These worlds have been muddled by the haze of their lives, only to be forgotten, to be cast away like old gods.
Sometimes I wonder... if the adults wish to go back to yesterday, to experience the full extent of their brilliance, the brilliance of the mind's eye of important places and memories.
Sometimes I also wonder if adults
remember their mind's eye, or if they have forgotten about the monsters and the citizens of the forest in which they were once the hero entirely?
Do adults strive to see the created worlds, again, but get distracted by the smog and exhaust from cars, the smells of sulphur, hydrocarbons, of rotten eggs and cities, and all the things that hold them in their perpetual lives?
I hope they will remember, remember the places where they belonged, where they fit without question.
My mind's eye takes me to a forest, lush, green, filled with long overgrown pathways perhaps once trekked by an
adventurer of renowned status.
I walked about in this forest, creating and destroying worlds as I saw fit; erecting kingdoms and appointing leaders; playing cruel tricks on the lands that I had under my thumb.
(Perhaps these worlds truly exist somewhere? I remember them all, and some times I have to wonder if they continue on, maybe hoping for me, their god, to return and guide them through a time of need?)
I was safe there, in that forest. I was happy there. I was free. I thought, I created, I destroyed, I played. I knew who I was, and I was at peace.
I sometimes return there, to my world, to the place where I can live without having to worry about what will happen
tomorrow.
I often allow my mind to wander back to these places, to find them in my mind - sometimes they are stored at the back and sometimes in the front.
Sometimes they are even misplaced and, once found again, beckon to me for my return.
And when beckoned, I always listen.
