I live by metaphors. Really I do. I need them. When I am stalked by conundrums,and doldrums, angst and despair, frustration and deadends, I search for a metaphor. Metaphors enable paradigm shifts. The need for self-discipline or self-talk diminishes. Metaphors help me see and feel differently.
A lot of my metaphors are gardening metaphors. I “dig” them. I do. I “sow” them. I do. It is because I live them in the garden of my backyard.
But sometimes gardening metaphors are too earth-bound , and I search for something to lift me beyond my ruminations. For example, when we first moved to Hawaii. I couldn’t find a gardening metaphor to work for me. If I put in roots, then it would mean that I would be living far away from my beloved family for more than a season. No, rooting couldn’t and wouldn’t work. I learned, though, about the golden plovers that come to our island every winter. Like retired Arizonia snowbirds, they leave their frigid northlands (Alaska) with a marathon, three-day flight to balmy tropical lands (Oahu). But maybe different than snowbirds, Oahu really is home to them. They return to the very same spot every year. Eat the same kinds of bugs to fatten up for a return trip. Then in Alaska they reconnect with their family responsibilities and procreate. Then they and their descendants start the cycle all over again. It is endless. In fact, scholars think that perhaps the first Oceanic pioneers millennia ago found the Hawaiian archipelago by sighting the plovers and knowing that land was close by. Because of plovers, they found a new home.
And it was plovers that helped me find “home” here. I watched a plover that came to my neighbor’s yard. He seemed quite content. When it was time to go, he just up and went. But he came back the next year. I realized that was what we did. Every summer, we returned to our nesting place—the place where extended family flourishes and multiplies. We live out of suitcases and visit parents and every sibling that lives along the mountains of the Wasatch Front . We reconnect. Then we return to our other home by the ocean and Ko`olau Mountains. Our children have sand between their toes—beach sand and desert sand. Both places are home.
Plovering helps me figure out how to live in the Pacific better. I don’t want to be an Abrahamic sojourner in a strange land. My soul has always yearned for home. But plovering says: you can be born in a faraway place, settle for more than a season in this glorious piece of earth and ocean, and it can be home. I don’t have to be a perpetual stranger.
Plovering between spaces. It is my metaphor. And it has liberated me to transcend homesickness for family and place. And it has helped me to transcend homesickness for my island home when I am on a continental island. In other words, plovering helps me enjoy fully the place I am in—whichever place it is. I have two homes. Oahu and the American West. I am not an expatriate. I plover.
