The topic for June 15, 2003:
How I Started Thinking About Place - And Why I Started Writing About It
The original posts on this topic are located at:
- [under the fire star] -- Most people don't really see the places where they live. I'm so lucky to have pulled up my roots and transplanted myself to a strange place ? Chennai, India. No matter how long I live here, it will always be somewhat exotic to me. I see it. Little things tickle me - or annoy me - every day. It keeps me on my toes. Because things are so interesting, peculiar, irritating, I want to share them with others. Look! Can you believe this? ... I live in an ancient culture, which has taken in many invaders. Yet it remains itself. I am fascinated by the modern things that have ancient roots. I want to tell you about them...
- [London and the North] -- As a kid I was fascinated by what was there - around you - but not visible: darkened stations which the tube passed through without stopping, lost rivers with names now operating as sewers, tracks on the moors which were once old coaching roads, mounds of grass covered rubble in remote places which we were told were the remains of Roman Forts. I have developed the phrase "mental landscape" to describe "my" world - "landmarks" are significant others (role models, friends, colleagues and family), places - marked by event, emotion, story (mine or another's).....
- [Fragments from Floyd] It is only in the past months, really, that I have seen a unifying theme in my writing and my life. While we have moved a number of times in our longish lives, there has never been a thought of moving away from mountains. The Appalachians, more than a single city or town or state, is my home, my place, and a unifying thread weaving my stories and memories together. Yet, this quiet valley is where I live my days, a microcosm of place that I offer to explain one life among the blue ridges of southwest Virginia. -- Fred First
- [Other Wind] ....I told a Welshman the Gower was the most beautiful place I had ever seen. He said I should see my own country before making my mind up about things like that. So then I had visions of traveling west, to the pacific coast, to the desert. I had only crossed the Mississippi once, yet the Appalachians, where I had lived a good portion of my life, didn?t even cross my mind....
- [Feathers of Hope (Pica) ] In November 1991, recovering from a marriage that began in Cambridge, England, and ended in Cambridge, Massachusetts, I went to Venice (Italy, not California). I had travelled quite a bit, but I had never taken myself on vacation before--I had never been alone in a new place recreationally--and I equipped myself with a notebook, some rolls of Tri-X, and contingency plans to visit friends near Milan in case I got too lonely...
- [The Cassandra Pages Sun June 15 2003] Beaver Meadow is a tiny hamlet in the hills of central New York. It hardly exists anymore, except as a crossroads, but that?s where some of my ancestors settled. A picnic I vaguely remember when I was four or five must have been one of the last times we visited the family farm. My grandmother reluctantly sold it not long afterwards ? the family had moved ?into town? years before, and her parents had died. But all my childhood I heard about that farm, and Beaver Meadow, from people whose lives had been shaped by that particular place with its trees and hills, the rhythm of the farm and the seasons, the neighbors, the pets and livestock, the secret hiding places of children. It was simply their way of thinking about identity ? that you belonged to the place where you lived and knew it intimately, because it was worthy of your attention, study, care, love, and memory...
- [Field Notes] You want to swim through it, to breathe it, and when you have and your sweaty limbs are streaked with dirt, and your nostrils caked with it, and your shoulders are sunburnt and blistered, you run through the waves and dive into the salty, warm ocean and float there, held by a dream that comes up through the earth and enters you, leaving you no choice but to love.
- [Bowen Island Journal] Moving to Bowen Island in 2001, combined with the samizdat opportunity of blogging led me to start this weblog to capture my experiences for myself, for my family who are scattered across North America and for friends in Israel, South Africa, America and the UK. As I have been writing about my life here, I am increasingly conscious of how blogging has brought a sharper awareness and attention to my life here. For me, blogging place is drawing attention to links in the elements that make up the landscape. As this blog has evolved, I have become acutely aware of the landscape that is forming in my mind and heart of who I am and what Bowen Island is as a place and what relationship exists between us.
- [Feathers of Hope (Numenius)] Of Space and Place: How do we resolve the division between our technologies of digital mapping and the knowledge of a place one gains through a saunter?
- [Pure Land Mountain] Some Thoughts on Place I was a traveler for many years, started young (perhaps therefs a travelerfs gene that somehow got very turned on in me), have lived and worked in many places, and would no doubt be traveling still if timefs road had not in the nature of things turned me toward having a family, which is travel on another scale altogether. Starting early in my travel time, though, I began to keep a journal (I think travelers come to need their own company perhaps more than stayers ever do), and one of the recurring questions that arose was: what is different, really different, about this place I am now, as compared to my home town, or to where just I came from? Why did I want to leave there and come here? With the variety travel exposes one to, one sees rather quickly that the external things, the cultural, the human adjustments, only comprise a small part of the big nature of a place. The real power of a place is time, and what it has done with the geography, the history, the culture of a place; its traces can be felt everywhere. I could see that dwellers in certain places were in love with places I did not find very appealing, whereas others disdained places I took to be paradise. I learned that much of our place relations are illusions that we bring to bear from whatever source wefve gotten them. And when at last I learned to seek right away for the roots of a place, its deepest, truest roots, I found that each place required a change in me, a devotion in a way, an erasure of preconceptions, to be able to see the place as it truly was. That has become for me the value of places: we may change them, but they change us more. And to remain subject to change, and thus the possibility of growth, throughout life-- who could ask for more? Especially a traveler. So it was really quite organic for me to write about place, in this case Pure Land Mountain where I live, beside Lake Biwa in Japan, and to bring to that endeavor what I had learned. I hope it is of some use to others.
- [Pax Nortona] excerpt from Writing About Place: We need not erect a mystery religion around an oak tree: just look at the tree, its slotted leaves, the acorns, the trunk, and the branches.
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