I grew up with speculative fiction — science fiction and fantasy. We moved a lot — I think I counted 10 schools in 11 years of schooling — which meant I spent a great deal of time in my books. This immersion in narrative led to me internalizing the grand American tradition that the natural occurrence of Life was being in the center of a story, doing marvelous things, while interacting with a full cast of well-rounded characters. My particular inflection of this meme led to majoring in Physics, to be part of that cutting edge of new knowledge, and hopefully make me some of my own someday.
After college, I moved back to the ancestral Dakota prairie, put down some roots, and began catching up on all that stuff-going-on-outside-of-my-head that I hadn’t been paying too much attention to. It feels wonderful to have some connection with the place where I live, to know that I came from here, and can choose to belong here again. And my particular place even has some of that inspiring narrative coolness – a certain “Giants in the Earth” feel missing from the more settled places I’ve lived. (Compare to the Florida panhandle, for example.) This gorgeous sense of place has gradually converted my focus for self-reliance from the final frontier to the first frontier — if we can’t do it right on Spaceship Earth, there’s no chance of doing it anywhere else. My current areas of interest are permacultural — converting the vast American Lawn into something useful, and designing homes that respectfully use the bounty thus produced. Turning pampered grass and blank expanses of roofing into sources of food and energy could have vast impact on international relations, and the future of the globe’s ability to support life.
Unfortunately the part I didn’t understand from all those childhood stories was that the central features in those narratives had to take action to achieve what they did — just passively consuming the stories in ANY media wasn’t going to get me anywhere closer to the climax of my own. That’s looking to be the major challenge of this part of my life — I need to progress from just making the plans, to actually carrying them out.
A Random Selection of Books from My LibraryThing Catalog: http://www.librarything.com/gwidget/widget.php?view=vortenjou&type=random&font=palatino&hbold=1&num=6
