Land Beyond Roots

From the front window, I look beyond my lawn of leggy dandelions, past the expanse of park, to the ocean. Rarely do I think about the distant place that I'm looking at when I gaze out there, but I imagine that it's actually far. From my window, I can see all the way to the horizon of the Salish Sea.

Here on the edge of things on the border-land when I look that direction, I'm looking at what some one, at some long ago time, determined was a different country than the one that I live in.

I can't see that from here. From here, it simply looks like the expanse beyond the expanse. And I guess in some ways that is some kind of different place.

It is surely a different place. It feels like looking from this moment beyond to the myth, beyond to times so long past that my bones don't remember them, because my bones, the pieces, the essence that makes up my bones, landed here so relatively little ago.

Place is a funny thing. We can feel at home so many places. And for some of us, maybe particularly those of us who come from different diasporas, our roots, our bones, our ancestors, aren't here, come from other places. And some piece of us, some piece of me, still feels a connection to those places. And yet, this has been the land of my own birth and life, for my time immemorial. It is a both and. And I find, too, that places in context, sit differently.

I felt at home in new Westminster in the apartment. And I feel at home here. Differently. This place calls me to be different, to be in the soil of the garden. At the apartment there was urban-ness and urban life. Music at the Heritage Grill. There was long walks down and along the quay. But there was no garden.

It’s just interesting to think about, what would life be like if that ocean was a little bit closer. Some part of me feels drawn to the places at the margin of beach and water. It is as if at some time, some ancestor understood that place. The littoral zone.

But I find, too, when I go into the Interior, to those more arid places, that the smell of that tickle something in my nose to some deep memory. And I wonder if some ancestor lived in a place that was arid in that way. Or maybe it's just childhood memory. Smells really do trigger those memory feelings. And it's interesting, because sometimes it is, in fact, memory feelings, as opposed to memories.

There is a call in my body to root systems in the land and I wonder, I suppose, which land. Where those roots might be. All the places that they have been.

The things that grow in me depending on where I am rooted.