One of the biggest advantages of an online course is the diverse and interesting situations that each student is studying from. From all across the world, crossing actual and cultural borders, it is really interesting getting to know everyone.

This assignment was so special because it let us look beyond all our different stories and find those threads that are universally found. Here are some that I really liked:

Home is…

1. family dinners, especially for the holidays. (One of my family’s biggest holidays is Eid-ul-Adha and the Eid dinner is definitely a huge part!)
2. adventures together, like hiking, camping, or beach outings
3. the process of finding home. (Many stories told of immigrant families re-creating home for their children.)
4. where mom and dad are. (Especially for people who’ve been on the move quite a lot).
5. family’s shared stories, their history. (I loved reading the stories to, by the grandparents of their lives, often agrarian ones and the nostalgia it brings even though it was often hard times. My family were indentured laborers in Guyana, South America under the British Empire. Working on rice and sugar plantations was brutal and hard work, but still those memories are the one they always tell and want us to remember.)

After completing this assignment, I realized something: not once at least as far as I read was home defined as a structure or a building. This is quite extraordinary when you consider that the dictionary definition of home is ‘the place where one lives permanently, especially as a member of a family or household.’

Home seemed to be more the things we do with the people we love. What does that say about the word home itself…where its literal and colloquial meaning are so different? Or has the meaning of home now become about the people and memories-the only thing static in a world that is becoming more and more transitory and globalized?

Works Cited

Baksh, Maryam. Eid-ul-Adha Dinner. 2015. Photograph. Vancouver, Canada.

“Forced Labour.” The National Archives. Government of the UK, N.d., Web. 12 February, 2016.

It’s the people, the chaos, and the food. The love , the comfort, and the sense of knowing it’ll always be there. Home for me has never been a place. I’ve lived on 4 continents and never been in the same house for more than 5 years. But I have never felt without a home.

This last summer, we went on a cross-country road trip to Toronto and back, over a week of driving and thousands of kilometers covered. It was home on the road. Every day we’d get in the van…and start the regular routine. Reading books, watching movies, arguing, eating, sleeping…the mundane things that make up day-to-day life. And every night we’d brush our teeth and go to bed. So even though we were at a truck stop in Sudbury one night or a trailer park in Swift Current the other, it did not feel like a too-long trip. It was home-on-the-road! We passed through the Ontario forests and the endless Prairies, saw the Northern Lights and the Rocky Mountains, and then got a nice stormy welcome into BC as the dry spell was broken with a crazy storm.

Some folks thought my family was crazy. 4000+ kilometers? And with 10 kids (yes, I come from a very big family)? In the heat of summer? But we just thought it was a lot of fun.

It’s how I look at home. It’s being with the people you love most, those you can argue with about anything, the one’s you can be silly or smart or sad or just nothing in front of. It’s being around people who you wouldn’t hesitate to do crazy things like go on long road trips or camp in your backyard.

Then regardless of what happens, how much you have to move or what life throws at you, once they are there, you are at home.

I guess looking at it all, my family is my home. Anywhere, anytime.

Work Cited

Algonquin Provincial Park. Accessed on 8 February, 2016.

Azpiri, Jon. “Massive Metro Vancouver storm leads to power outage, fallen trees.” Global

     News. 29 August 2015.  Accessed on 8 February, 2015

Many, many years ago,the land of the people was a different place. There was laughter and tears, happiness and joy, love and hate. For since the start of time there was good and bad. It was a perfect world and the witch people kept that balance in perfection.

The witch people were the Guardians since the start of time. They were a group of 13 and their numbers never changed. 6 good and 7 bad, and that was and is still.

Each year they gathered all together. it was when they presented their new inventions to the world and shared in each others company for a time. First they drank their fill and ate some of the finest foods and then enjoyed all sorts of games.

And then there was the contest. Each witch told a story that shared their newest creation with world. The creations were good or bad, matching the countenance of the teller.

So one told a story of men and women and children living on the land year after year. Then the other told of one person who hated another. Then another witch countered with a story of one who learned forgiveness. And so it continued with the good and the bad witches telling their stories in turn, each one countering the one before.

Soon it was the turn of the sixth and final of the bad witches to tell her story. She was not the worst of the witches and her story was not the most horrible of the stories.

She told a story of one who saw all the evil that was already in the world. That was not new but then she added her invention. She added a person who saw but choose to not speak; she told a story of a person who choose to keep silent.

And of all the stories of murder and hate and jealousy and war, it was this story that shocked the witches the most. Even the bad witches gasped in shock. And the good witch who still  had her story to tell filled it with so much love, hope, family, growth, and joy.

But still with all the good things she had filled her story with, this story could not counter the one before. All the witches All of them, good and bad, turned to the witch of silence.

“That story cannot be told,” they cried. “Take it back for we have nothing to balance it with. We have no good thing to oppose silence.” They begged her to take her story back. But she couldn’t. “But, of course, it was too late. For once a story is told, it cannot be called back. Once told, it is loose in the world” (King, 10).

The question of evil in the world  is often told in a Pandora’s Box-style metaphor. Its intersection with the concept of stories is interesting. Once it is out, there’s no taking it back. I really enjoyed this assignment…the creative aspect alone was fun. But also seeing the way it is experienced by people I told it to and how their reaction changed my story.

My sister asked about the silence, and had a lively debate about what silence meant in this context. If I meant silence as in one’s own deeds or in a more global outlook. I found then that when I went to transcribe the story to this blog, I had fine-tuned a few parts to make it clearer as to the story i wanted to tell.

Earlier we learned that the each time a storyteller retells a story, it takes on apart of them too. After this lesson, I also learned that the listeners too change the story. Oral storytelling allows them to react and interact, whether it is with words or just facial expressions. They too change the story the next time it is retold.