My cousins came to visit today. They live in Texas and had never been to our house or studio before. Over the years M in particular has read what I write--my view from the studio, walks to the pond, dog antics, firing the kiln, or weeding the garden. M needed to see the architecture of our life with her own eyes to match it against the compass of my stories. We have the shared history of a family of raconteurs who have built both shrines and traps with their telling of life and travels. So we compare notes and impressions to find our place in family history. Warren's side of the family comes from non-raconteurs who count and aim for the point as quickly as possible, so he finds my habits surprising, picking and choosing certain details to attest to the vastness of our world. He is familiar with counting the number of miles traveled while I try to narrate the distance of blue in the humid evening air.
"Stories are compasses and architecture, we navigate by them, we build our sanctuaries and our prisons out of them, and to be without a story is to be lost in the vastness of a world that spreads in all directions like arctic tundra or sea ice."
― Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby
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