So for this blog post, there may not be many words, but instead images. I'm doing something I've been wanting to do ever since the route planning scene in Chapter 20 - develop a visual understanding of Lauren's journey. So Lauren starts out in "Robledo", which is about 20 miles away from Los Angeles (according to Wikipedia), and I couldn't find a real community called "Robledo", so for the purpose of mapping out Lauren's path, I'll just use Los Angeles itself as a starting point. We know that Lauren, Harry, and Zahra walked along the 118, 23, and 101 freeways on their path from LA to Santa Barbara, so here's that: Then we know that they walked a long way on the 101, and the next place I can find them mentioning is Salinas, CA. They find the radio earpiece that tells them to stay away from the Bay Area, leading them to turn east through San Juan Bautista, Hollister, by the San Luis Reservoir, then along I-5 through Sacramento. Their final...
Hello reader. Again I present a blog post that is primarily not writing: a map of the characters that emerge in the later half of the book and their relationships to each other. The first Earthseed community is composed of a diverse set, and while creating this map I gained an appreciation for how the group grew and evolved along their journey through California. To wrap up this blog post series, I wanted to come back to the concept of God as change. In the last two "mapping" blog posts, I've explored how location and social connections changed drastically for all the characters throughout the story. But more than that, we can see how the intentions changed - the intended path and the destination as far as geography is concerned, and with social connections, the changing nature of how people joined the traveler group. And I guess I could end with something sappy like how God was with them along their journey, but I'm really more interested in how deceptively stable t...
I wanted to offer a point for discussion about Lauren's God, which is the following: why does Lauren call her God "God"? Here's my reasoning for asking this. The one constant feature of Lauren's bolded writing at the start of each passage is that "God is change". Lauren also acknowledges that most people around her have Gods that are represented as father figures or even just as some sort of being. I think most people would agree that the mental image of a God is much more likely of some sort of humanoid form rather than something so hard to visualize as the concept of change, which can't even be described as an entity. So why does it make sense to Lauren to call something so different by the same name? Here are some potential answers I have to offer: 1. "God" is the starting point for Lauren's thought. What I mean is that perhaps all of this thinking about the forces affecting the human experience that Lauren has done was originally ...
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