Saturday, January 10, 2009

Boots laced up, don't know if where how to go

"Everyone has "[an] ideal place, [a] right place, ... one true home" promises Edward Abbey.
"Find your place on the planet, dig in" says Gary Snyder.
"If we are not home, if we are not rooted deeply in place, making that commitment to dig in and stay put ... we are living a life without specificity, and then our lives become abstractions. Then we enter a place of true desolation" asserts Terry Tempest Williams.
"Are space and place the environmental equivalents of the human need for adventure and safety, openness and definition?" asks Yi-Fu Tuan.

I don't know my place, don't have a true home, can't dig in, crave adventure and openness more than safety and definition. Buffalo, New Hampshire, Arizona, Morocco, Russia, California, Wyoming, South Dakota, Kansas, all home, all not.
I'm part snow, part water, part sunshine, part sandstone, part juniper, part coyote, part meadowlark. I'm part river, part forest, part desert, part grassland.

What if we're every place, and thus no place?
What if we need to move every few months, before who we are can catch up with where we are?
Barry Lopez would say "you must stay. This is the pain of it all. You can't keep leaving...What makes you want to leave now is what is trying to kill you."
I don't know what making me want to leave now, don't know how to keep it from killing me, so I'm sorry, I can't tell you whether it's better to sit still, to dig in, to find depth in the here and now or forever strive for answers in some there and then.
Please, I'm just lists of quotations, albums of photographs, a mind full of memories, a soul full of questions, an accumulation of rocks and leaves and driftwood.

No comments: