To Make My Everyday
Knowing and Sharing a Place
One of the most important things I know is familiarity. It is the richness that layers onto life. One can also be familiar with pain. This is not that letter. This letter wants to talk about the sweetness of it.
Mary Oliver said,
I love that line. In my year of place, I think of the attention I have given where I live. It is a special moment to realize that you are building a life onto a place. When I first moved here, it was about finding my way. At times, it was because I was lost, walking at night or escaping for a moment in the day. Eventually, I found the fastest way to something. Eventually, I found the most beautiful way to something.
A tree that struck me on a recent walk. The fall is my favorite time of year.
The paths of my neighborhood know me well now. They didn’t once. I have met them time and time again for many different reasons. My destinations show myself; my pathway shows myself. My life is stretched out step by step on the paths just outside. I retrace my life when I walk.
I repeat. I etch deeper and deeper each step. This was once the walk I took to get my first groceries after moving in. This was later the walk when I would call my friends in the evening. This is later where I would walk through when friends first visited. This is the walk where I would look back and think about my first days and how they still feel so familiar and close at times. In this moment, it is the sentiment of feeling lost or fatigued (they are so often the same for me) that bonds then and now. Later, and even moments in between now and then, there were new tracks of thrill and pride etched. But it also takes a lot to do so little today. This is reason to despair, if it doesn’t also lower the bar for reasons to celebrate.
I think of Roland Barthes’ book, Empire of Signs. It’s a fascinating little book (and thought experiment) about experiencing a new place and culture in the world. There, he writes about traveling to Japan. He notes the design and character of Tokyo neighborhoods, saying:
“This city can be known only by an activity of an ethnographic kind: you must orient yourself in it not by book, by address, but by walking, by sight, by habit, by experience; here every discovery is intense and fragile, it can be repeated or recovered only by memory of the trace it has left in you: to visit a place for the first time is thereby to begin to write it…” (p. 36)
Barthes is one of those philosophical writers that is also able to blow you away with beautiful prose from time to time. “...only by memory of the trace it has left in you…” is wonderful. I view DC in a similar way, my chosen home.
If you know DC United, a line a childhood soccer coach used to say was, “it’s not about winning; it’s about having fun”.
And so it was that I had the chance to share this place. My parents visited me earlier this fall, and I had the chance to share my tracings of DC. We had Ethiopian food. I took them to the tower, the old clock tower where I have taken friends. I showed them the city from there, this subtle secret of DC. We went to a soccer game at Audi Field and had arepas. Ole and I had a meeting of the parents (but this is not that letter). I took them to the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, showed them the courtyard there, a place where I simply enjoy my time with a language workbook or book of poems. This is what I use to make my everyday. My small life sits on this hill.
One must remember that there is always familiarity in process, and it happens in places. When I moved here, I used it to my advantage. I repeatedly spent my time at places so that people would know me and that I would know them. When my parents visited, I used it as a gift. What a rich thing this is indeed.
Trevor
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