This weekend, our assignment for English class was to fill out a few charts about our Querencia, and then write a page describing it. The word "querencia" is Spanish, meaning a safe place, one that molds to your character and just where you feel the most at home out of anywhere in the whole world. It has its origins in the verb "querer", which means to want, desire, or even to love.
Maybe your querencia is in a simple a place as your own bedroom; or maybe, it's a vacation spot you've been to once and never gone back there. Or like mine- a place I've never been to before that I want so badly to create.
It sits in the mountains in the North, a tiny log cabin with only a small cleared yard and a trodden dirt path leading up to it, swallowed entirely by a vast wilderness. Inside the cabin lies a room, a room where anything is possible. The floors are wooden and the walls are white, the only adornments floor length curtains rustling in the breeze that slips through an open bay window.
My only two possessions in the whole room are a pen, a small, beat-up journal, and a netbook. That's where I'll do all my research and make the infant ideas in the journal blossom into something more that I probably never imagined they could be. Though the room is bare it is never empty or unlived in, for each day I paint the walls with my mind, decorating them with posters, photographs, characters. Lives. Lives that bustle through all the days when I am gone, be them blustery snowdrifts, cool crisp apple-days, storms of flowers and lightning, or settled mildly warm hazes. Yet only when I come do the voices rise into a silent cacophony that fills the air with at once nothing and everything, drowning out the howling wolves and chirping birds that nothing can understand except querencia.
Where is your querencia? Is it in the woods, by the beach, in the city? Noisy or quiet- or both? Tell me!
