Hello and welcome to the 25th issue of Place! Perhaps as late as 100 years ago, human communities commonly lived and died in the same place, like their parents and grandparents before them. Travel for leisure was out of reach for most, while the place that shaped one’s life remained a constant. In today’s world, it's much harder to come across someone who has lived in the same place all their life, whether they were forced to move from the place of their birth due to conflict, necessity, choice, a new opportunity, or a combination of the above. Today, Place editor Kylee Pedersen asks what this means for finding a sense of belonging, and whether or not such a sentiment can be (re)attached to the physical world.
At Place, we believe that the experiences, sensations and conversations we have as we move about the world stay with us, stacking up as the years go by, forming who we are and the way we view the world. Do you have a letter to share? Send it to us at placeletter@protonmail.com. If you are interested in writing for Place you can find our inaugural pitch guide here. If you’re the social type, follow us on Twitter (@place_letter) where you can share your favourite pieces and Instagram (@placenewsletter) for a visual feast. Yours, The Place editorial team.
A Place to Belong
When my mom speaks of her home, the place that she grew up in Ontario, Canada, she speaks of the trees. In that part of the world, openness is a feeling found on welcoming front porches, but not by the roadside, where the trees and low lying brush block the view past the edge of the concrete.
Roads and footpaths curve between swaths of sugar maple, hawthorn, and oak, that clothe the landscape in secrecy. Turtle crossing signs and hidden driveways lurk behind every bend; you wouldn’t know a village in the countryside is there until you are on its Main Street.
In autumn, the trees that framed my mom’s childhood are lit in a flame of red, orange, and yellow. They ignite, then give their leaves to the ground in great heaving loads, cushioning the ground with a wet and generous embrace. We’ve lived, they say, and we’ll be back.
Now living across the country to the west, at the edge of the Canadian prairie, where the sky opens and earth stretches out beneath your feet, threatening your sense of control with a horizon too far to bear, my mom mutters in the car, “I miss the trees of my home.”
Home can mean different things to different people; but in many cases, it comes in a physical form. When we are displaced from our homes we long for them – homes possess something that makes us feel whole, or at ease, or closer to our true selves than another place could. When my mom says she misses the trees of her home, I can’t help but feel that she is missing a place that she feels she belongs, one that was moulded in childhood, an attachment that has cemented itself within her.
As humans we long for belonging, a feeling that has long been shown to be beneficial to our lives and our psyche. Often the study of belonging conceptualises the feeling in spiritual or immaterial ways. In his book Eternal Echoes, John O'Donohue, an Irish poet and philosopher, speaks of belonging in this way:
“Our hunger to belong is the longing to find a bridge across the distance from isolation to intimacy....When we belong, we have an outside mooring to prevent us from falling into ourselves.”
While O'Donohue argues that our longing to belong is never truly satisfied on earth, looking inward and finding new rhythms in community are good places to start. Indeed, many studies of belonging conclude that person-to-person attachments are more closely linked to building a sense of belonging than that of person-to-place. Maya Angelou is quoted as saying, "You are only free when you realize you belong no place – you belong every place – no place at all.” By these definitions, belonging is in tension with physical place – it demands a more temporal or liminal understanding.
I think about my mom in the car, missing the trees of her childhood and the formative years of her life. I think about the conversations I’ve had with friends over the last few years, who have uprooted their lives and moved elsewhere, starting over in a new city or town. Whether they saw an opportunity, a partner got a job, a family member got sick – I have watched people close to me migrate across postcodes and borders, sometimes, it seems, at an increasing rate.
The through-line in these chats with friends, is that there often seems to be a resounding uncertainty over a physical place where they are ‘supposed’ to be, whether that’s at present, or in the future.
If belonging is discussed so much as something detached to our physical surroundings, I wonder why so many of us continue to seek it out in place.
The idea of a place revealing something true about us to ourselves is by no means a stretch. Underpinnings of travel for leisure were inspired by acts of pilgrimage, the idea that movement to a place anew would reveal something about the world and your place in it that was unknown before. In this train of thought, the journey is prized more than the final destination. The Japanese poet Matsuo Basho, was restless in his success and is known to have been a great wanderer, who travelled on foot throughout Japan during the Edo Period. In his perhaps most famous travel diary, The Narrow Road to the Deep North, he writes, “the journey itself is my home.”
The solace that pilgrimage and travel offer, while not bringing permanent attachment to any one space, is a renewed focus on the physical space that surrounds us – a vestige, I think, of the connection between place and belonging. But while pilgrimage and travel may engage the desire within us to pay attention to place, they are still temporary. Finding belonging in a place still requires another step.
Years ago, for a story I was writing, I spoke with a woman named Bernadette Demientieff about her ancestral home in Alaska that was being infringed upon by both the oil and gas development and the rising ocean. Bernadette and her community, the Gwich’in people, are not only being physically displaced from the homeland they’ve always known – it's actually disappearing before their eyes, eroding into the sea with each spring melt.
Like many other indigenous communities, Gwich'in culture and identity is one in the same with the land, their very language formed by the seasons and species they rely on. The Gwich’in refer to themselves as Caribou people; a community whose identity is rooted in the survival of a 300,000 animal herd, who migrate through the Arctic Refuge Reserve each year to their longstanding calving grounds on the Northern coastline of Alaska.
Bernadette told me about the feeling she gets when she is in her homeland, when she’s surrounded by elders and her people. She had no way of describing it, it was something she said that was almost spiritual. She refers to the place she grew up as “the sacred place where life began.”
“We can’t have a Gwich’in people without this place.” she said.
At the time, I wrote down that I heard sadness in Bernadette’s voice over the voice, exhaustion from the battle she fought daily to protect her people and the place that they were from. But I also wrote down that I felt drawn to the clarity with which she spoke about the place that she belonged. It seemed so secure, so comforting, that people could come and go, the world could change, but for hundreds of years the land had still been there. Now I suppose, that too is up in the air.
I wonder if our collective discussion of belonging as something separate from place is a way of coping with the mass emigration that recent memory holds for the majority of people I know around my age – our removal from ancestral homelands long ago to the malleable and anonymous city, where differences between apartments or highways or high-rises are relatively undistinguishable. Our detachment from place gives way to our need to create belonging apart from it, as our culture and ways of being becomes less in sync with the rhythms of landscape or the natural world than some communities who still live in that way, albeit under threat.
And still, it seems that parts of this connection remain in us, whether it is the memory of the ocean that lapped at the outlines of a childhood, the rain that put one to sleep at night, the red fired trees that lined the path my mom walked to school.
Surely, there remain corners of this earth that beckon us to belong there. Maybe there is a kind of freedom that can be found in that.
- Kylee Pedersen is a writer and editor based in London, UK.
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Join us next week for another journey.