For the past 6 months, in the time I was working from home.  I was actually reading into books and listening to albums. A lot of them had a common theme around their love for their neighborhood. They speak about the rivers, and the life of the city of no post code envy, or even wrote about them escaping it to explore the surrounding area. I became so envious of their hometown that it’s got me reflecting about my home. 

I currently reside on an Indian reservation somewhere in the middle of the desert in Arizona. And for 20 odd years this is where I call home and can’t complain of the life I lived here. Yet at times I find it difficult to be inspired of the area. Don’t get me wrong I think we have more than enough culture, and history to re-write for years to come. But even after a few retellings of the Infamous Apaches can be overplayed. I’m thinking of things that made my childhood just a tad different from the rest of the world or at least in America,

because let’s be honest there’s a fine line between America to Indian country.

So going back to these beautiful retelling of home. I often find myself listening to these songs while driving the roads across the reservation and often find myself in awe of these songs. These people were so inspired of their neighborhood to encapsulate a part of their hometown to share with the world. That I become so envious to do the same. Their fearlessness to share an intimate aspect of their lives made so easy, that I often struggle with mine. A perfect example is Arcade Fire’s The Suburbs. I could listen and feel right at home while driving these reservation roads, yet I know for certain this is far from suburbia. It’s songs like that that make me feel the need to share a part of my hometown.

It’s just a matter of how I want to encapsulate the time of my youth in the desert. I could write of the landscape, and how it made my childhood so memorable by playing in the valleys of the mesa or the little villages made along the cacti of the neighboring hills. Or I could sing about how time seems to stand still, and how I recall how every time I left, I returned to find it exactly the ways it is.

In whatever format I decide to share my hometown. All I know is that I must share it. I owe it to myself to find whatever it is that makes the reservation home and be able to articulate these feelings for the world to see.