The Main Idea

The project is called The Language of Place. Even to me, that sounds a bit vague, but I like it that way. The thing is, I can’t really know what I’ll be writing about until I get there, so I suppose The Language of Place says enough.

A lot of my life has been spent moving from one place to another. Rootless. And, yet, I feel at home in the most unexpected places. Places where I don’t speak the language, where the food is different and I walk down the street without recognizing anyone. As a result, I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about landscape and how place forms us, how it shapes us into the people we are.

I decided on this theme because I want to write and I don’t want to go to India with a preconceived notion of what I’ll be writing about. How could I possibly do that? Maybe some people can go across the world with a clear outline of what they’ll be doing, but for me, part of the attraction is not knowing. I’ve never been to India. How do I know what I’ll find? I can’t even imagine what the country smells like, what sorts of sounds I’ll hear, who I’ll meet.

The Language of Place is the language of the unknown. It’s a language I’ll know when I hear it, but until then, the writing is a dream, a blank page that India will help me fill.