So this post will be more of a ramble and not sure if it will be too informative, but I just felt compelled to share it. I don't know what it was - whether I was a bit loopy yesterday, had a great dinner out, with a combination of watching Joel (the doctor) last appearance on Northern Exposure, or maybe I was super happy cause my jacket just came in the mail. ANYWAYS, I had this crazy dream last night and something just clicked and it really made sense, though now I can't reiterate it back fully, but I will try.
First I looked up Northern Exposure and the last episode that Joel (the doctor) appeared in. SPOILER ALERT!!!!
So in Joel's final episode, apparently he had been in the wilderness cause he loved it so much (you can ask Janelle more about this). Well, in the episode, he and that woman are in the snow and he is looking for the fable "Jewel City" of the North, and he just ends up seeing New York through the now and wilderness. So he goes and about to go further so he can get back to New York and he wants her to go with him and she says that is for him and her place is in Alaska. They hug and say goodbye. Later they show her getting a postcard from him and it was a picture of Staten Island with New York in the background and on the back he wrote "New York is a State of Mind" and you see him on a ferry about to reach NYC.
Back to my dream! I know I was in Green Lit, and someone was talking to me about this and I'm going to paraphrase our conversation even though I can't remember exactly what we were talking about or in the context: (it was with a female classmate, but I just can't remember exactly who it was)
Girl: You know sometimes you just have to find your own place to have time to yourself.
Me: I guess it's good to have some peace.
Girl: Well, it's kind of the same thing, when you look for inner peace, you have an inner place. We have a sense of place when we feel or put some symbolism of peace into it, but it is peace that is a state of mind and when you find it or acquire it, you find your place.
So I'm not doing a great job of remembering the whole thing, but something clicked in my dream and in my dream, I told myself I had to post this one the blog. We probably already mention this when we talked about place, but it really resonated in my during the dream. A lot of time we don't often talk about our sense of home or place with psychical attributes, but instead a feeling or a memory. So I wonder if we identify with place because of the peace it brings us and that's why we cling onto it so much. Then on the flip side you have those who are looking for peace. Like in the show Joel found his peace in the wilderness and it lead him back to NYC, which was his 'place/home'. So when we are looking for the inner peace, once we get of some peace within ourselves, we have found our 'place' per se. That is where we have peace and comfortable with things. Well, sorry for the ramble, just thought I should post this.
how funny! i was actually debating b/w the episode i showed in the class and the episode you discussed above. so thank you for filling in where i had to leave off. i like very much how you discussed the question of "home" in NE. it is, frankly, what the entire series is based on: take a jewish ny doctor out to the city, put him in ostensibly the most foreign opposite (alaska), and see what happens. it's the ultimate "home" experiment. and i always thought it an intriguing moment of exit: joel swings from one extreme of the pendulum to the other, only to find himself back where he started... like turning 180 degrees, and then another 180 degrees, to come back to the same point. and yet it never is the same point, is it? (remember that notion of a cycle moving as if in a spiral? it's like that. you can never go "home" again if you expect it to be the same. but you can always find "home"!)
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