Gunilla Norris’s Being Home is about being in a place. The idea of place is one of the recurring themes in this online collection of notes.
Being Home is the shortest book about place I’ve read. It strikes me as a model for those thinking about writing a book. Here’s an outline:
• It contains 40 items, variously described as meditations, prayers and poems on the everyday activities that make up our lives. I like the word poem in the Greek sense of “a made thing.” The poems are about activities: waking up, getting dressed, making breakfast.
• Each poem is page or two or three. The 40 poems are on 71 pages in my edition.
• Norris is good, in a way that I am not, at getting her finger on a paradox: Sometimes, in doing the simplest, most routine things, we bump into a mystery. We all live in a place, but if we tend to it, pay attention to it, we at least become aware that we bump into things that are mysterious, that baffle us. (I can get lost in thought while sweeping the steps.)
One of my favorite poems in this series is about dealing with paperwork, something that I don’t like to do and don’t do well. I love these lines:
I know there is an order here
But it will not show itself.
When I go through my papers, I want to impose order. I don’t want to make discoveries. But it works better if I simply pick up each bit of old paper and see what connection it has to the life I live now in this place. The new order gradually becomes clear.
• Source: Gunilla Norris, Being Home; New York: Bell Tower, 1991, p. 47.
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