Home Is the Road: Wandering the Land, Shaping the Spirit

The land carries voices. The land remembers what happened upon it. In traveling the land, I become familiar with more than myself. Give me the journey of the road; it is my journey home.

From the award-winning Native American literary writer Diane Glancy comes a book about travel, belonging, and home. Travel is not merely a means to bring us from one location to another. My sense of place is in the moving, Glancy writes. For her the road is home–its own satisfying destination. But the road also makes demands on us: asking us to be willing to explore the incomprehensible parts of the landscapes we inhabit and pass through–as well as to, ultimately, let them blur as they go by. This, Glancy says, is home.

Glancy teases out the lessons of the road that are never easy to define, grappling with her own: childhood’s puzzle pieces of her Cherokee heritage and a fraught but still compelling vision of Christianity. As she clocks an inordinate amount of driving, as she experiments with literary forms, she looks to what the land has held for centuries, before the roads were ever there.

This, ultimately, is a book about land, tradition, religion, questions and the puzzle pieces none of us can put together quite right. It’s a book about peripheral vision, conflicting narratives, and a longing for travel.