A Sense of Place

Sunset from Cape Perpetua, October 28, 2008. As dark settled in I set up my tent in an old growth forest to read In Search of Ancient Oregon.

When I moved to western Oregon fourteen years ago, knowing that this would be my home for some time to come, I wanted to establish the same sense of place, the same deep spiritual connection to the land, that I developed over many years in my childhood home in the Minnesota River Valley.  So I set to work digging in the soil, learning its texture and odor, sowing seeds, learning what would grow in which season.  I took off exploring, not just on trails but setting up camp in the backcountry under old-growth firs, reading In Search of Ancient Oregon by headlamp to gain a sense of the forces and events that had shaped this land over deep time, given rise to the mountains and valleys and plants and animals and ecosystems.

I learned the weather patterns, the scents unique to each season and wind direction, the trees, the plants, the rocks, the creatures with whom I share this place.  I slept under the stars in my own backyard or on top of Marys Peak, waking up covered in dew and curious beetles.  I rehabilitated an old wood-fired hot tub so that I could relax under winter rainstorms or the light of Orion and Sirius.  And beneath and beyond this physical experience and deepening relationship I began to feel places.  Marys Peak feels sacred and benevolent, and this feeling extends outward to the lands around.  The immediate coastline bears a sort of foreboding, perhaps borne of inundating tsunamis past and future.  There is an area to the north of my town where the land feels ill; I have only recently realized that this corresponds to roughly a four-mile radius around a massive landfill.

In part, I can attribute my way of experiencing the world to my childhood, as I grew up in a wild, mostly unmanaged landscape that had been fully explored and investigated by my father.  Edward Stone, man of the valley, seeker of sacred places, always learning new plants, recording sunset times, measuring moon shadows, in search of what was – his favorite word – significant.  My father was a man whose chosen spiritual path parted him painfully from family, from career, from many friendships and human connections.  And it would seem that when he could no longer be rooted in human society, he chose to be rooted in place.  Such it was that I grew up rooted in place, an only child in a home with little television or other distractions, spending most of my free moments building trails, redirecting creeks, burying my nose in moss, lifting rocks to find blue-tailed skinks, climbing trees to watch sunsets, building secret blinds to observe the sparrows in their thickets.  I was much more comfortable alone in the woods on a dark night than at a school dance or a dinner party, and I came know the land as – I would like to think – the land came to know me.

I chose a college that had a giant arboretum of mainly native ecosystems, and in my four years there I became rooted in that place: working on the management crew, conducting research, leading tours, and finally creating an interpretive guide as a senior project.  Looking back, I feel much more of a nostalgic connection to “The Arb” than to any part of the otherwise beautiful campus.

It would seem that I am in an extreme minority with this manner of experiencing the world, and I am not sure how to go about teaching others, should they wish to learn.  It is not merely a matter of appreciating nature or seeing the beauty around us, gathering huckleberries or mushrooms, backpacking to alpine lakes.  It is, rather, a matter of feeling embraced by the wind, blessed by warm sunshine, caressing the soil while sowing seeds, feeling at home and rooted and a sense of belonging as part of the living planet that surrounds us. 

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I have a theory that the development of an ecological spirituality begins with this sort of personal relationship with the land and proceeds roughly as follows:

1. Individuals become rooted, learning the weather and seasonal patterns, finding and naming special places, tending gardens, finding or hunting food in the wild, feeling at home and at peace as a part of the whole.

2. This connection deepens across time.  The names and personal meanings of places become layered with memory: this is where we got married, this is where my father planted an oak tree to celebrate my birth, this is where I visit every solstice to journal, this is where I scattered my father’s ashes, this is where I surprised the sleeping long-eared owls, this is where my daughter found her first firefly.

3. The connection expands across community and generations.  This the grove where the whole town celebrates the harvest, this is the apple tree my great grandfather planted.

4. Stories morph into legends and folk tales and songs, taking on lives of their own.

5. Land-rooted legends become land-rooted myths, and myths provide answers to the great mysteries of life.  Who are we really?  Why are we here?  This is the mountain from which our people first descended, this is the forest where the spirits will speak to you.

The process can stop at stage four if the community already has a strong religious tradition that provides answers to the great mysteries.  Examples would be Amish settlements, parts of Appalachia and the American South, where communities have lived on the same land for many generations, developing a rootedness that remains coupled with a strong Christian belief.  I don’t want to suggest that this is in any way a hierarchy, with more land-rooted communities somehow superior.  I do know that I, personally, would like to live in a society that has reached stage five – in some future life if not in this one.

There is a story often told in our culture that we – descendants of European colonists – are not rooted to this land because we have not been here long enough, somehow suggesting that the process of developing a meaningful relationship to place takes many centuries.  That ignores the fact that nearly all of rural America made it to stage three by the early 1900s and has been moving backwards ever since: people increasingly uprooted, moving off of land and into cities, chasing careers around the country and around the world, time spent in relationship with the land and our fellow creatures replaced by time spent in cubicles and staring at screens.  Now we even have screens that live in our pockets, bringing the buzz of modernity into our woods and gardens.  Increasingly the natural world has become a backdrop rather than a home for us.

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It is impossible to ponder the development of rootedness without considering the Indigenous peoples of this continent, all of whom were people of place, societies at stage five and who had been at stage five since time immemorial.  As Vine Deloria Jr. writes in God is Red, these peoples traditionally did not conceive of religion as we do, as a set of beliefs and philosophies and places of worship.  Instead, religion was encompassed within their relationship with the land: stories and sacred rituals connected with sacred places, with the arrival of the salmon, with the falling of the acorns, with the blooming of the camas.

It is difficult to fully fathom the genocide wrought by European settlers and our governments and armies against the Indigenous peoples of this continent.  Aside from the wars and massacres and novel diseases that killed the vast majority of individual humans, forced relocation nearly destroyed most cultures.  Forced relocation for modern urban humans is an offense, an affront, an injustice.  Forced relocation for people of place, taking people away from their sacred lands with which they have been in relationship beyond living memory, is effectively an unpersoning, an annihilation of meaning and purpose and identity that leaves an empty, sad, aimless shell, alive but not really alive.

I feel it is essential that we come to terms with this sad chapter of our history, and that we work to support Indigenous groups seeking to rebuild a sense of identity and regain access to sacred ancestral lands. This is a deep wound that will take a long time to heal. At the same time I often find myself at odds with the modern “social justice” interpretation, which appears to me to be overly rigid and judgmental, to incite feelings of guilt rather than inspiring positive change, to prioritize shallow achievements like renaming and language edits over real shifts in power, and to fail to confront the most important factors driving inequality.

Recent decades have seen a revival of traditional Indigenous lifeways, spearheaded by those peoples who managed – by virtue of aridity or isolation or tenacity or luck – to remain on parts of their ancestral lands.  Some European descendants have been strangely fascinated by Indigenous practices and ceremonies, perhaps sensing there the rootedness that they are lacking.  Unfortunately, adopting Indigenous beliefs and rituals is not a recipe for rootedness.  Not only is appropriation of these sacred ceremonies by descendants of conquerors rather rude; it cannot substitute for the personal experience of connection to the land and all of its inhabitants, the deep sense of belonging and connection from which the mythology and practice ultimately arose. I do not believe it is possible to jump straight to stage five without first developing a strong personal, familial, and community connection to the land we inhabit.

It is true, though, that the Indigenous peoples of this continent have much to teach us about belonging to the world we inhabit, becoming rooted in place.  For any who are interested in approaching this from an Indigenous perspective, I highly recommend Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer.  She is able to merge a modern scientific understanding of the natural world with a deeper, more personal, relational and storied understanding in a way that is accessible to those who have been lacking this connection.

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In the last ten years or so, there has been a growing trend to begin all events and formal gatherings with a “land acknowledgement”, which usually goes more or less as follows:  “We are gathered today on stolen land: the ancestral homeland of the ____________ people, who were forcibly removed to reservations by the US government in violation of signed treaties.” 

Like many aspects of the modern social justice movement, this seems good at first glance but it is, from my perspective, counterproductive.  It does nothing to directly restore access for Indigenous peoples to their sacred lands.  It establishes a sort of virtue signaling, wherein simply including a land acknowledgement in a program makes one – in the eyes of some people – a better person or a better organization.  Most concerningly, though, it sets up a psychological barrier of guilt to beginning the personal process of becoming rooted in place.  If this is stolen land, we think, then perhaps we do not really belong here.  Perhaps we cannot in good conscience belong here.  Perhaps it is not our place to know the trees, the birds, the rivers, the winds as friends. 

Such an idea is anathema to the development of an ecological spirituality, along the lines of beliefs in various religious traditions that the physical world is an illusion or a “lower” reality that we should seek to transcend.  To establish an ecological spirituality, we must believe that we have a right to belong to the land we inhabit, just as we must believe that we are here in physical bodies for the purpose of being fully present here.  And, I would suggest, we descendants of colonists do much greater ongoing harm by failing to become rooted in place, failing to see ourselves as part of the ecosystems we inhabit.  There is no plausible future in which two hundred million white Americans board ships back to an overcrowded Europe leaving this continent to be repopulated by Indigenous peoples.  As Indigenous peoples rediscover their traditions and reconnect to their sacred lands, so too must all of us learn to become people of place, to develop rooted communities.  The alternative – a continuation of a world in which we regard the natural world as merely a backdrop and a resource to be exploited – can only lead to ecological ruin.

The statement that is called a “land acknowledgement” fails to provide any, well, acknowledgement of the land.  And I’d like to change that.  A true land acknowledgement, spoken regularly, could go a long way toward establishing reciprocity and rootedness.  So, on this Equinox, I offer the following, as an inhabitant of the Willamette Valley, tucked against the edge of the coastal mountains:

We gather today on sacred land: land that has supported our ancestors for seven generations and the Kalapuya people for millennia.  We are nourished by the Willamette River, which carries snowmelt and fertile soil from the high mountains to our fields and whose falling tributaries create the electricity that powers our lives.  We stand in the shadow of Marys Peak, the living mountain known to the Kalapuya as Cha’timanwi, Where the Spirit Dwells.  We give thanks to the forests that surround us: places of beauty that also provide us with shelter, winter warmth, and clean water.  We honor the great Pacific Ocean, from whence come the winter storms that will soon end our summer drought.  We acknowledge all of the plants, animals, insects, fungi – all of the life with which we share our home - as kin.  We offer our deepest love and gratitude to all that sustains us.

Have a blessed Equinox!