This spring has been tricky. It's given us the remnants of the winter we barely experienced. It is nice though to see the beautiful snowy white peaks of the prominent giants in the distance.
I have been a little less excessively welcoming of the sun and the warmth this spring season. The winter was unusually not rainy, and I've learned to deal with the rain a little better now.
Life has an impossibly intricate and interwoven design to it. Being in a metropolitan area, but not being at the core of it, has shown me a radically different view of what I thought about cities. No longer am I in the core, nor am I completely removed. Everything flows in patterns, where one relies on the other, yet not all is equal nor equitable.
The semi-periphery is full of beautiful contradictions. People work in another place, they play in another place, they go to their doctors appointments in a different place. The only consistent thing about this place is that people sleep here.
But maybe I am defining place incorrectly? I mean, in my mind a place is an entire town unto itself. It's contained, enclosed, and separate. There are no "places" that match my definition within twenty miles. There are a collection of little towns, some with their own characteristics, others without. "Carter Park" is a neighborhood within Vancouver, whereas Thurston, Ohio is the neighborhood. That's what it is. It's a simple separation of articles of speech.
I guess you could substitute "neighborhood" with "community", "location", or "place".
Stacked like an order of operations, place has an expanse to it. Especially when you bring together hundreds of thousands of people in one region. And I don't think I've ever really thought of that before.
It reminds me of the Chinookan artwork in the Cathlapotle Plankhouse. On the middle post there is a black arc of the earth that sweeps up from the ground, and a red arc coming from the heavens follows the same pattern. In the middle of the post is a black ring and within it a black circle, that form a somewhat target shape in the middle of the beam.
The outermost ring of black symbolizes the world, with its outer shell of life and vastness within the red of the heavens. Inside the ring, the red of the heavens is with those on the ground and within the earth. Finally, that black dot is your immediate family and kin. Those that you know the best.
Chinook peoples are still here today, and built and painted that house, and I think it is a good pattern to use. It is also great because it is simple. Only two layers, one within another. My view of the world is that of many layers, usually not so well organized and engineered. The core and the peripheral rarely follow a perfect circle, and do they rarely follow a two stepped process.
I try to navigate those layers, and I enjoy every second of it.
When you live in a metropolitan area, there is still a sense of self-contained place to be found - you just have to draw your circle a little bigger. In a small town, you draw a small circle - here is the place where people live, and work, and play, and the circle is a few miles across. In a city, the places where you live and work and play are all still in the same place - even when you live in one part of the city and work in another one, it's still all the same city (even when the city is subdivided). How do you figure out what the circle looks like, what the place is called? I call it the "tourist question." When you're out of town, and a stranger asks you where you're from, what do you say? That's your place. When I lived in Arizona, I lived in Tempe, I worked in Chandler, but when I was out of state, I would say I was from Phoenix. That was my place, my circle on the map, even though very little of my life was conducted within the actual geographic boundaries of the City of Phoenix. The metro area defined your place, and if you ran into someone else from "Phoenix," you (first) welcomed a breath of home in an unfamiliar place and (second) identified *where* in the monolith you called home. To a fellow Phoenician, I was "from" Tempe.
ReplyDeletePortland is a little more... divided? There's something about the state line, or maybe the river, that causes people to talk about "the Portland metro area and Vancouver," as if somehow Vancouver isn't part of it. But when people ask me where I'm from, that tourist question, the answer is still Portland - because that's where the circle is drawn. To another Portlander, I'm from Vancouver, and if they're also from Vancouver, I'm from Fruit Valley - but the concentric circles of my life are still ultimately contained within a specific geographic area that is THE place.