Walking my way back home

Place-making begins with the investigation of oneself in place, and with the experience of the body"”a particular enfleshed body"”situated in a particular material and affective landscape. The body in this chapter is my body. It is my body in a place that I used to call home, and that I still respond to as home with a resonance in the deep folds of my body. In contrast to the writing projects in earlier chapters that focus on places of the present for their authors, on new places to which they have come to live, this chapter and the poetic text at the heart of it attends to the past as much as it does to the present. This is a poem of longing, and of the ambivalent love I continue to feel for a particular place, the small beachside suburb in the northern wet tropics of Australia, in north Queensland where I lived for more than a decade. I wrote it on a visit back there, five years after leaving, when a friend loaned me her house for a week. I lived quietly for that week in the present and the past, knowing and not knowing this place and myself within it, belonging and not belonging at the same time. Walking and writing, poetically mapping my memories of the places I passed, became my daily practice and my strategy for walking my way back home.