The University of the Self #26
Beginning to Decipher & Articulate My Interpretations of Place: Never the Same Place Twice (Part 1)
Place is the ultimate shapeshifter, an amazing costume changer and season chameleon. Life, to me, seems to be about making the absolute most and best of what you have. A few years ago, I began to slowly accept that I would never be a world traveller in the expected sense — that there would be, for numerous reasons, many places I would fail to realise my dreams of visiting. I admit that it was very difficult to accept at first — indeed, every day, at some point, I experience a pang of sadness, a spike of regret and a dose of self-dislike that it seems that my life must be limited so.
The joy has been in looking closer, then closer, then closer again. The valuable lesson for me has been appreciating what I do have access to and being grateful for it. Place has taught me kindness, to be more accepting, more forgiving, kinder. Place has taught me the privilege of safety. Place has helped me sink a few roots — if not very deep, at least down enough to hold me steady for a while, stop me instantly tumbleweeding away. I think often of the concept of the ‘forever home’ — oh yes, she said, on first viewing the property: this is my forever home. Have I found mine? I don’t know. Will I find mine? Have I already left it by mistake? I don’t know that either.
Perhaps my forever home is the misty, obscured and distant place I sense somewhere upon the horizon of my mind — intangible, elusive and always beyond reach. It keeps me hoping, questing, believing, imagining. Perhaps the forver home is the journey through the many places themselves. Perhaps the forever home is your heart.
Perhaps my forever home is already here, beneath my feet, and I have sacrificed years of potential contentment on the altar of my inbuilt ability to be constantly dissatisfied. Perhaps I have grown so used to striving to creep my varied living situations to better suit my needs, increment by increment, that I simply do not know how to stop and smell the roses. I am the same as a reader, poet, writer and artist. Every month I look at the content I have read and produced and tell myself come on – read better, write better, paint better. Learn better. You can do better. Sometimes I get cross with myself — with what I know are my creative deficits. One thing I have learned about myself for sure through the decades is that I am always capable of more, if I just keep on my own case, keep pushing, keep working, keep trying. Every year brings the unlocking of new layers — it reminds me of my son, when he was small, working and working on playing Mario Kart, so he could earn more cars, more characters, more worlds to race in.
The pain is the process — the reward is a new pain, a new process which turns the trial previous into banked skills, new self-respect and a comfortable familiarity. And on and on it goes into the future.
See? This is exactly how amazing place is. Begin to consider it and write about it for a moment and it sends you on yet another unexpected voyage of self-discovery. Place yourself and be placed in return. In reading Mary Oliver’s Upstream, I began to understand that many of us need place in order to decipher ourselves.
“In the beginning I was so young and such a stranger to myself I hardly
existed. I had to go out into the world and see it and hear it and react to
it, before I knew at all who I was, what I wanted to be.”
(Oliver, p.p. 3-4, 2016)
If this is the one place you shall be, if this is the one place you have access to right now, then go deeper, I decided.
Learn it deeper, observe it deeper, know it deeper,
understand it deeper. Learn its years, months, weeks, days, hours,
minutes and seconds deeper. Learn its weathers deeper.
Learn its flora and fauna deeper. Learn its dawns, mornings, afternoons,
dusks and nights deeper. Learn its sights, sounds and smells deeper.
Learn the other people who share the place deeper.
I thought about the ‘old’ me — the me before I began to widen and my thoughts upon place, and this quote from To Build a Fire, by Jack London, written in the early 1900s (read this piece with caution as it contains an offensive, discriminatory word and a scenario of death) reminded me of how we humans can be in place somewhere and yet remain disconnected from its wider meanings:
“The trouble with him was that he was without imagination. He was
quick and alert in the things of life, but only in the things, and not
in their significances. Fifty degrees below zero meant eighty odd degrees
of frost. Such a fact impressed him as being cold and uncomfortable,
and that was all. It did not lead him to meditate upon his frailty as a
creature of temperature, and upon man's frailty in general, able only ~
to live within certain narrow limits of heat and cold; and from there
on it did not lead him to the conjectural field of immortality and man's
place in the universe.”
It has taken practise, this deep landscaping, this deep placing. It will take a lot more practise still. As with everyting to do with learning and writing, I feel I have only just begun. I do struggle with sometimes doses of wanderlust, with fleeting moments of dissatisfaction (I am human, and it is best to admit to one’s human-ness, I think).
I wonder sometimes if I have given in too easily to acceptance. Why am I not angrier about access? Am I a quitter? Am I letting people down? Am I allowing myself to be reduced by elitism/inequality becasue I have lost the will to fight against it? Or is it something I don’t have the means or ability to flail against it anymore? Or am I a rebel, becasue no matter what, it cannot quell my creativity? Life reduces my circumstances and I shrink myself down to fit them. Don’t I? Or is it because of the limitations that I have expanded as a creative within those self-same limitations because I have learned to look so deeply therein, that magic, inspiration and passion keep blossoming? I am lucky, so very lucky to have been able to make a home so near to nature — I never stop reminding myself of such a privilege.
Many days, I forget that I am poor, because I am only financially poor. How can I feel poor in a place like this? This place where I live gives me endless reminders of how rich one can feel amongst the jewels of nature and landscape? I wish money didn’t exist. It has done its best to make the world a greedy, evil, elitist, unequal place. It cannot buy happiness but the lack of it causes devastating, stressful and dangerous situations. Money is the antithesis of place. I am running way off topic here and getting myself into quite a tangle. Perhaps I should have been born a bird, or a mouse or a cobble in a stream. Nothing in this world seems simple enough. This is when I need place the most — in these times when I am tumbleweeding uncontrollably through my own mind.
I must circle myself back to the original intention of this essay, which was to wax lyrical about deepening one’s responses to a location. Yes, I always want to write essays and fragments about place — it is their subject matter I am often not entirely sure about until I begin. This time, it was the reading of two particular books which inspired me to rattle my keyboard into life.
I love it when books come to you at the exact right time. I always fail to read with any logic or plan — my reading choices run to finishing one book and then sitting on the low footstool in front of the shelves leaving instinct to drive my next selection. I have to ‘fancy’ a book to read it right then — there is a moment of connection I can’t explain. Sometimes I pull at a spine only to find my mind saying no, so that book has to go back for another time. Sometimes I feel a strong rightness, and that book becomes my right now love.
As a small digression, this is also why I need a lot of time when I am asked to write an endorsement for someone else’s book — my brain can resist the reading of them until all surrounding factors deem it the best moment to do so. I don’t know why this happens and I don’t know if I am alone in this.
The two books that created a fertile nourishment ground for my thoughts to grow in were The Summer Meadow; Forty Acres of Shared Earth, by Miriam Darlington (Candlestick Press, 2024) and A Woman in the Polar Night, by Christiane Ritter (Pushkin Press, 2nd ed., 2024), which was originally published in 1938 and translated by Jane Degras in 1954. I couldn’t resist The Summer Meadow because of its gorgeous cover art (by Niki Bowers), and its combination with place/nature writing. Darlington’s essay about the regeneration of a local meadow is beautiful. She writes:
“Once, we had waded out into the grazed green field, dreaming of
a fluttering hem of butterflies around our legs. Now they were here…
Here in the hay meadow, and in the rough pasture next to it, nature
had made all the right decisions.” (Darlington, 2024, p. 9)
The fields that surround our little wooden cottage have been rewilded. Last year, many seeds were sown, but there didn’t seem to be many flowers besides the ones that have always grown among the crops — a rotation of barley, wheat, oats and rapeseed — poppies have always been plentiful, and the contrast of their scarlet faces beaming from the ripening golden stalks are a marvel. The wild pansies are exquisite. Perhaps the fields needed time to rest, become used to this change of direction. This year, the fields have been incredible — in May, a whole new selection of wildflowers began to reveal themselves in spectacular layers of height and colour. First, there were profusions of crimson clover and fernleaf fiddleneck, neither of which I had encountered before. Scattered amongst these were coins of meadow buttercups and milky clouds of cow parsley.
I couldn’t believe that I was there, right there, to witness such natural magic. My husband mowed the grass behind our cottage for easier access and placed an old bench there, next to the plum tree we planted last year from a self-seeded sapling, so that we could sit and marvel. I cannot describe the sense of pleasure and immense gratitude I felt at being able to share in the field’s unfettered, uncontrolled growth. The field was free of human interference.
I began to spend much time here just breathing, sitting, breathing some more. I looked at the immediate foreground, the middle distance, the far away edges of the field. I half closed my eyes to simplify the field into areas of colour, light and shade. I closed my eyes to better hear the voice of the field. I looked at the passing of the sky overhead. I began to deep place, to discover a truly meaningful, devoutly private relationship with the field. I thought of Mary Oliver’s words:
“For me it was important to be alone; solitude was a prerequisite
to being openly and joyfully susceptible and responsive to the world
of leaves, light, birdsong, flowers, flowing water.” (Oliver, 2016, p.111)
When Miriam Darlington wrote “A mind has filled the meadow” (Darlington, 2024, p.7), I thrilled, as I think I know exactly what she meant.
Please stay tuned for part 2, coming soon…
Sources
Oliver, Mary. Upstream. 2016.
Darlington, Miriam. The Summer Meadow: Forty Acres of Shared Earth. Candlestick Press, 2024.
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