The Faraway Nearby Read Online Free PDF

selves, or just drink up quiet and respite.
    The bigness of the world is redemption. Despair compresses you into a small space, and a depression is literally a hollow in the ground. To dig deeper into the self, to go underground, is sometimes necessary, but so is the other route of getting out of yourself, into the larger world, into the openness in which you need not clutch your story and your troubles so tightly to your chest. Being able to travel both ways matters, and sometimes the way back into the heart of the question begins by going outward and beyond. This is the expansiveness that sometimes comes literally in a landscape or that tugs you out of yourself in a story.
    I used to go to Ocean Beach, the long strip of sand facing the churning Pacific at the end of my own city, for reinforcement, and it always put things in perspective, a term that can be literal too. The city turned into sand and the sand into surf and the surf into ocean and just to know that the ocean went on for many thousands of miles was to know that there was an outer border to my own story, and even to human stories, and that something else picked up beyond. It was the familiar edge of the unknown, forever licking at the shore.
    I told the students that they were at the age when they might begin to choose places that would sustain them the rest of their lives, that places were more reliable than human beings, and often much longer-lasting, and I asked them where they felt at home. They answered, each of them, down the rows, for an hour, the immigrants who had never stayed anywhere long or left a familiar world behind, the teenagers who’d left the home they’d spent their whole life in for the first time, the ones who loved or missed familiar landscapes and the ones who had not yet noticed them.
    I found books and places before I found friends and mentors, and they gave me a lot, if not quite what a human being would. As a child, I spun outward in trouble, for in that inside-out world, everywhere but home was safe. Happily, the oaks were there, the hills, the creeks, the groves, the birds, the old dairy and horse ranches, the rock outcroppings, the open space inviting me to leap out of the personal into the embrace of the nonhuman world.
    Once when I was in my late twenties, I drove to New Mexico with my friend Sophie, a fierce, talented, young black-haired green-eyed whirlwind who had not yet found her direction. We had no trouble convincing ourselves it was worthwhile to drive the two days each way to New Mexico because there was a darkroom there that she could use to print photographs for a project we had. In those days we were exploring who we wished to become, what the world might give us, and what we might give it, and so, though we did not know it, wandering was our real work anyway.
    I had discovered the desert west a few years before with the force of one falling in love and had learned something of how to enter it and move through it. I threw myself into the vastness whenever I could, and I began to have another life among the people of the desert who befriended me, and the places, and the illimitable sky that seemed like an invitation to open up and grow larger.
    In those days I was finding my voice and my vocation and they were flourishing, but I was not yet hectic or pressured, and I found countless excuses to wander in that empty quarter of the continent, camping, visiting, working with Native American activists, discovering a world that demanded new senses and delivered wild gifts. We must have taken the most scenic route, because Marble Canyon was not on any imaginable direct route. It’s the first canyon below Glen Canyon Dam, at the head of the Grand Canyon. We had driven through the flatlands and mountains of the Mojave, through the highs and lows of the Arizona desert, then past mesas and escarpments of red sandstone and spread out a tarp and slept on sand near the murmuring river that night and ate breakfast in the