I increasingly feel like I’ve lost the ability to have an outsider’s view of this place. How does one keep their perspective fresh to an outside reader and do it in an appropriate variety of styles?
More and more the unique perspectives are coming from others. There is a shift towards more active listening, listening to comments from friends and family, reflective on myself, their lives, their intentions, and their hopes.
Here are a few of those reflections spanning a range of emotions.
“Todd, you are usually impossible to read. You tend to hide things well.”
“It was weird being home, trying to be the person she thought I was before I left for Gambia. But I’m just not anymore, I’m not.”
“I never realized how much of a role we were playing as cultural ambassadors. When my parents were visiting my village, this was obvious. Everyone has a better view of Americans because of my actions living with them.”
“In village I can’t even begin to turn on my brain for that kind of work. Have you ever considered editing writing as a profession?”
“So let’s say I wanted to switch my house to a completely solar set up, totally self sufficient. What kind of money are we talking about?”
“No, no, no. You see what she doesn’t know is that as a bachelor I used to cook all sorts of things for myself. If one can go to the market alone, why should they not be able to cook for themselves?”
“That boy, he was truly talented with his hands. He learned how to do woodworking quicker than any of my other students, but he just couldn’t get serious. I had to tell him to go.”
28 January 2008
21 January 2008
A Short Fairy Tale
The eastern woods of the Western Region was a land that, for the city dwellers, seemed untamed and backwards. Logged forests, salted tributaries, and drought had desecrated the land over the course of many generations and no one seemed to remember it’s original fertility. The roads, ghosts of a rickety path set down by European colonists, were dilapidated to a point of preventing a positive flow of growth or prosperity. Driving down this road in a lonely and rusting vehicle, a quiet traveler felt as if he was in the precense of someone painfully lying on their death bed.
Within the confines of this region lies the small rustic village of Bwiam. Approaching from the east the village appeared to sit on a slight incline letting it’s visitors feel lifted up into it’s embrace. The change of emotion is much needed as the path to the village is far from inviting. Water-deprived moaning woods flank both sides of the road, and the tired traveler’s mind had been repeating this same scene of decay for hours.
As the car jumped and rattled around a slight bend in the road a large oval structure popped out of the tree-lines. Higher than any tree and bright reflective white in color, the structure appeared to be hovering in mid-air. Bending his head high and crunching his neck muscles together to view the sight, it seemed to want to fly off it’s four tiered skeletal base. The giant white bowl was smooth and round on it’s bottom half but triangular shaped at it’s top; it appeared like a giant flattened out toy spinning top. In comparison to the greys and browns of the dying woods, the shattered black and crushed white of the seashell gravel road, the bright shiny white structure appeared to the traveler as coming from another world.
The car approached clunking up and down, closer and closer. As the car moved along he forced his neck muscles to remain locked on the object, and it was then that the traveler realized he had been tricked by the magic of perspective. Indeed, the structure appeared to decrease in size and grandeur the closer and closer that he came. With a more intimate view it was obvious that it was something much more plain that his awe would suggest, it was a merely a water tower.
He looked up at this structure in it’s reduced state, a giant brought down by inspection, and realized it should not be reduced or thought of as any less momentous for it’s steady delivery of drinking water. Then he pondered if humanity would always find a way forward.
Within the confines of this region lies the small rustic village of Bwiam. Approaching from the east the village appeared to sit on a slight incline letting it’s visitors feel lifted up into it’s embrace. The change of emotion is much needed as the path to the village is far from inviting. Water-deprived moaning woods flank both sides of the road, and the tired traveler’s mind had been repeating this same scene of decay for hours.
As the car jumped and rattled around a slight bend in the road a large oval structure popped out of the tree-lines. Higher than any tree and bright reflective white in color, the structure appeared to be hovering in mid-air. Bending his head high and crunching his neck muscles together to view the sight, it seemed to want to fly off it’s four tiered skeletal base. The giant white bowl was smooth and round on it’s bottom half but triangular shaped at it’s top; it appeared like a giant flattened out toy spinning top. In comparison to the greys and browns of the dying woods, the shattered black and crushed white of the seashell gravel road, the bright shiny white structure appeared to the traveler as coming from another world.
The car approached clunking up and down, closer and closer. As the car moved along he forced his neck muscles to remain locked on the object, and it was then that the traveler realized he had been tricked by the magic of perspective. Indeed, the structure appeared to decrease in size and grandeur the closer and closer that he came. With a more intimate view it was obvious that it was something much more plain that his awe would suggest, it was a merely a water tower.
He looked up at this structure in it’s reduced state, a giant brought down by inspection, and realized it should not be reduced or thought of as any less momentous for it’s steady delivery of drinking water. Then he pondered if humanity would always find a way forward.
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