Flight Behaviour
I just finished reading Barbara Kingsolver’s latest novel, Flight Behavior. As usual, this Kingsolver book is about the concept of “home.” In this particular narrative, she speaks of the tenuous nature of the “home.” She weaves a story that describes the tension between the draw toward home and the desire to fly away to something…
Continue readingFollow-up to Recent Reading
One more book recently read: The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver. The following sentences are key to the story she tells. “The most important thing about a person is always the thing you don’t know.” – Barbara Kingsolver, The Lacuna. “. . . that you can’t really know the person standing before you, because always there…
Continue readingThe Lacuna
Barbara Kingsolver’s latest book, The Lacuna, contains a number of insights into world politics in 1930 through the early 1950s. At one point, Kingsolver gives a powerful analysis of the events that led to extreme investigations into the disloyalty and subversive activities of American citizens suspected of having communist ties. In the 1940s through 1950s,…
Continue readingHome, Hard To Say What It Is
I once again find myself thinking about the concept of home. Home is so much more than a house or a city or a family or a marriage or a collection of people with whom we feel an affinity. Home is at the deepest core of what it means to be human. Coyotes have dens…
Continue readingUprooted
In Beyond Homelessness, Walsh and Bouma-Prediger speak of the writings of Barbara Kingsolver. In Speaking of our contemporary patterns of uprootedness, Kingsolver says that the urban “exodus from the land makes me unspeakably sad. I think of the children who will never know, intuitively, that a flower is a plant’s way of making love, or…
Continue readingHome
Lately, I have found myself reflecting upon the concept of “home.” What does it mean to have a home? What does it mean to be homeless? Which aspects of home are transferable from one place to another and which ones are not? As I work through this I find a number of resources are part…
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