Music
Right from the opening paragraphs, music is situated as a significance element in the life of the memoirist. References to music will recur throughout the text to the point of transforming it into motif. But first, it becomes metaphor:
“Music is a language that lives in the spiritual realms, we can hear it, we can notate it and create it, but we cannot hold it in our hands. Music can help raise a people up or call them to gather for war.”
“Every soul has a distinct song.”
Carrying forward with motif of music into further realms of spiritual being, the authors asserts that within each soul is a unique song. And this metaphorical assertion is not limited to human souls. Even places sing the song within their ultra-dimensional being:
“Even the place called Tulsa has a song that rises up from the Arkansas River around sundown.”
Institute of American Indian Arts
In 2019, Joy Harjo became the first Native American to be named the Poet Laureate of the United the States. Her memoir includes a metaphorical recollection of attendance at the Institute of American Indian Arts. The experience wielded influence greater than mere artistic instruction or aesthetic reasoning; it became a crucible of spiritual therapy and an opportunity to embrace a wider social order:
“It was in the fires of creativity at the Institute of American Indian Arts that my spirit found a place to heal...Mine was no longer a solitary journey.”
Television
Television also plays a significant role in the development of the author, though it is endowed with a more ambiguous moral aspect than music. Which is not to say that the medium is not deemed worthy of the author’s most elevated metaphorical aesthetic. As with most things, she is able to find poetry even in that which is at heart distressing. Thus television is transformed into:
“the story box that changed the story field of the world…television stands in the altar space of most of the homes in American. It is the authority and the main source of stories for many in the world.”
Doorways
Another recurring motif in the text are doorways. So plentiful are the passages where the author describes arriving at one of these portals that she feels compelled at one time to literally address the metaphor for the sake of clarity:
“There are many such doorway in our lives. Some are small and hidden…others are gaping and obvious, like the car wreck we walk away from, meeting someone and falling in love, or an earthquake followed by a tsunami. When we walk through them to the other side, everything changes.”
