A sense of place

“You can’t know who you are until you know where you are.”

Wendell Berry

By the time I was eleven years old my family had moved six times. As a United States customs agent my father was transferred every couple of years to a new location. For the most part, it wasn’t a problem for my two older sisters and I. Even my mother seemed to carry on without much complaining.

That all changed when we moved to a home outside of Toronto. The house sat in one of the most beautiful settings one could imagine. It was the first time I had ever become intimate with land. Sure, in all the places we lived there were open spaces to explore with your friends; places to build forts, “play war”, ride our bikes, go fishing, catch frogs and snakes or examine bird nests. There were trees to climb, rafts to float, kites to fly and places to lay in the grass and look for shapes in the clouds. That was the great gift of growing up in suburbia during the sixties and seventies. It was taken for granted that at the edge of every development was a wild place. Land that for the time being, had been left untouched.

Most people I know have a place somewhere in their memory that has special meaning. A park they would visit with family, a secret fishing hole, or a camping trip to some wild place. Wherever it was, the natural world opened up to them in a new and wonderful way. The family farm is mostly a thing of the past, but many people of my generation spent at least part of their summers on “the farm.”

I remember reading a story of a young boy who rode with his grandfather on a horse drawn sled to retrieve firewood his grandfather had cut and stacked the previous summer. When the young boy grew tired of helping, he wandered about, feeling small as an atom among the great trees. Oak and beech, hickory and ash and sycamore. He peered timidly down the gloomy isles between the trees. He was at once enchanted and fearful. Each time he followed one of the corridors away from the clearing he hurried back to be reassured by the sight of his bundled-up grandfather stooping and rising as he picked up the cord wood and tossed it into the sled. His grandfather stopped from time to time to point out special trees. In the hollow of one great beech, he found two quarts of shelled nuts stored away by a squirrel. In another tree with a gaping rectangular hole chopped in its upper trunk, the owner of the woods had obtained several milk pails full of dark honey made by a wild swarm of bees. Still another tree had a story to tell. It was an immense sycamore by the stream bank. It’s interior, smoke blackened and cavernous, was filled with a damp and acid odor. One autumn night, there, hunters had treed and smoked out a raccoon.

As a grown man he tried to find that great woods again but never could. For him, the lost woods were a starting point and a symbol. It was a symbol of all the veiled and fascinating secrets of the out-of-doors. He wrote- “It aroused in my mind an interest in the ways and mysteries of the wild world that a lifetime is not too long to satisfy.”

When Henry Thoreau was five, his parents, then living in the city of Boston, took him eighteen miles into the country to a woodland scene that he, too, never forgot. It was, he said, one of the earliest scenes stamped on the tablets of his memory. During succeeding years of his childhood, that woodland formed the basis of his dreams. The spot to which he was taken was Walden Pond, near Concord. Twenty tree years later, writing in his cabin on the shores of this same pond, Thoreau noted the unfading impression that “Fabulous landscape” had made and how, even at that early age, he had given preference to this recess- “Where almost sunshine and shadow were the only inhabitants that varied the scene” – over the tumultuous city in which he lived.

I was only eleven years old when the land surrounding our new home captured me without my noticing. A stream flowed through the back yard with a waterfall. I was surrounded by meadows and woods, old orchards, abandoned farms and walking distance to the Credit River. A young boys paradise. I’ve written about this place often, but only recently have understood it’s full impact on my life.

Unfortunately, like so many places of beauty and wildness, the area has since been developed. Millions of tons of concrete and asphalt now cover, what to me, was the most revered place on earth.

Perhaps, I have been too afraid to attach myself to any area I’ve lived since. A haunting notion that this is only temporary has followed me to this day. It’s like living on shifting sand where I have to constantly adjust my position just to stand in place or be lost. I have the sense that no place is sacred anymore and any place I bond to is likely to be bulldozed.

In attachment theory it’s called avoidance. Pretending that our ties with someone or someplace are not important because it’s too painful to show our feelings and risk being abandoned. But there is a problem with this, because we cannot protect something we do not love, we cannot love what we do not know, and we can not know what we do not see. Or hear. Or sense.

In The Nature Principle, written by Richard Louv, he writes, “As humans we primarily identify ourselves through relationships. Relationships with family, religion, ethnicity, community, town, state, nation. While most recognize where they live by its cities, buildings, places of business, even sports teams, how many identify with and understand the beauty, wonder and actual functioning of the natural ecosystem that supports us and of which we are a part of? Our loss of connection is among the most important and least recognized needs of the human soul.”

Unfortunately, we live in a time when children spend more and more time indoors and no longer have the freedom or even desire to roam free and explore the natural world. It’s a lost art in the age of wall-to-wall media. The problems that arise from this are greater than an epidemic in obesity rates among children. The rates of mental illness have been increasing as well.

Even today, I require time outdoors. And not just outdoors but, outdoors in a wild and secluded setting. And alone. It’s how I keep my sanity in an insane world; It’s where I go to heal, to be connected spiritually to a source of infinite grace and welcoming acceptance and inspiration. I understand that not everyone can draw this kind of communion with nature. For some, they would just be bored. But boredom has its benefits. So does solitude. To occasionally be alone – not lonely, but, alone – is an important part in learning to be creative.

As our species wanders farther away from wildness, we become more dazzled and dependent on our own technology. A technology that seems destined to become ever more sophisticated and yet we never seem to mature sufficiently to fully understand or control our own inventions. The natural world becomes more foreign and less accessible. Every generation that comes after will have less nature and less space, but it will seem normal to them because they’ve never known any different.

We live in a big world and for now, at least, there are still wild places. For people like me, our purpose in life is to instill in as many people as possible a desire to explore, connect, understand and grow intimate with what is your birth right as a citizen of the world. In the words of Joseph Wood Krutch; To not merely escape from something but also into something … we have joined the greatest of all communities, which is not that of man alone but of everything that shares with us the great adventure of being alive.”