Often when I am away from home (And by home here I mean my home in Washington State) I reflect on what it means to have a sense of place, that is an innate longing, knowledge, and love of one place. Often this sense of place is attached to where you grow up. Sometimes it is found in a place where you spent some of the most memorable days, weeks, months, or years of your life. I personally have experienced this sense of place in only a few places. First and foremost my home in Port Orchard, WA. There is something entirely soothing about being home that is directly tied to both the land and the people on it. Here amidst the verdant evergreens, fresh air, and drizzling rain my entire person is at ease. I know these woods, I recognize these trees. I can climb into the treehouse in the forested gorge out front and remember the many days I spend in the woods reading a book or playing with my siblings. Life here makes since. Second there is Whidbey Island, also in Washington state. It is here that my love of God's Creation truly came alive and my desire to study and care for it flourished under the tutelage of the teachers at Pacific Rim Institute. It is an island I gladly called home for a month and would do so again in a heartbeat. It is where I saw my first Orca pod plunge through the water, sun shining off their massive dorsal fins. Third there is the Au Sable campus in Northern MI. Ah the memories I made there, the incredible conversations I had there with people of like mind and faith, the everyday encounters with nature that my heart earnestly aches for. In Northern MI (Mancelona to be precise) I encountered true tranquility. A rest away from the modern world, to simply sit in a hammock and read Wendell Berry while an Eastern Phoebe fed its chicks in its nest by the pond, or rest in a boat and lazily fish while the stars come out. Pure bliss. It is here that I slept under the milky way and watched the Pleiades meteors roar overhead, lighting up the sky with their fury. It is here where I fell in love with forested paths and seeing the beauty in the seemingly mundane.
Because I have experienced a true sense of place, however, when I am gone from those places,when I am separated from those places my dad would call "God's beauty spots" , I feel the ache of homesickness. Other places I visit, like the Bay Islands of Honduras, the deserts of California, and the forested hills of Pennsylvania may be truly amazing and beautiful in their own way, but they are not home. Home, as the old saying goes, is where the heart is, and mine is held captive by the mountains, forests, and seas (And yeah that was a bit mushy sounding and not entirely accurate, but it is true). The more I look around, however, the more I find that many people never develop this sense of place. In the helter-skelter rapidity of modern life, most people are simply to busy with their education, working on their career, or occupied by the digital world, to take the time to develop a sense of place. Rather than taking the time to understand the many facets and aspects of part of God's world, we prefer the far simpler task of knowing bits and pieces of the world (whether through travel or the internet) and never truly know a place for what it is (Note: do not attempt to treat this sentence as a polemic against traveling. If done properly traveling is a truly wonderful thing that can teach you much about God's world and people).Often in my travels (WA, OH, MI, CA, Honduras) I meet many people flitting from place to place with no sense of belonging, adrift on the winds of chance as it were, with no real home, no salvation in Christ, and no goal in life. Such people make me sad. Why is there this lack of placeness in people's lives (And yeah I totally just made that word up)? Is this the result of sin's curse upon mankind, or is it simply that some people are wired differently than others?
Anyway, this has been a brief discourse on a subject that is very dear to my heart and directly connected to environmental issues and conservation. If we do not know the land and nature in which we live, how can we even begin to care for it properly? I think often about issues of place and purpose and I highly recommend if you are interested in additional discussion about this and other issues to read a collection of essays by the Brilliant agrarian, Wendell Berry entitled The Art of the Commonplace. To finish off this post I leave you a poem from Berry's Timbered choir which aptly, I believe, describes our need for a sense of place.
"Coming to the woods edge
on my Sunday morning walk,
I stand resting a moment beside
a ragged half-dead wild plum
in bloom, its perfume
a moment enclosing me,
and standing side by side
with the old broken blooming tree,
I almost understand,
I almost recognize as a friend
the great impertinence of beauty,
even to the fallen, without reason
sweetening the air
I walk on,
distracted by a letter accusing me
of distraction, which distracts me
only from the hundred things
that would otherwise distract me
from this whiteness, lightness,
sweetness in the air. The mind
is broken by the thousand
calling voices it is always too late
to answer, and that is why it yearns
for some hard task, lifelong, longer
than life, to concentrate it
and make it whole.
But where is the all-welcoming,
all-consecrating Sabbath
that would do the same? Where
the quietness of the heart
and the eye's clarity
that would be a friend's reply
to the white-blossoming plum tree?"
-Wendell Berry in A Timbered Choir
Sincerely,
Christian Hayes
P.S. I understand if you think a lot of this particular post is somewhat rambling. It was intended to be. Feel free to shoot questions at me via posting, FB, or email. Always interested in discussing this topic.
A beautiful tropical palmate leaf that reminded me of the leaves of buckeye trees in Ohio
