archived published posts

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-Out here you mark time by space. The land is always present in you. The smell of wet leaves after a rain. The grit of fresh soil under your nails. The glitter of water in noonday sun. The silence of snow. 
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-More than the words that describe them, places become real things in which we exist and locate ourselves, our past, our present, and how we measure the scale of ourselves. We speak not of things that happened, but of things that happened and where they happened. Experience gains extra dimensions. Places become a way of locating the self within the world that is either not necessary or not possible when the places in which you exist rarely change.
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-In his remarkable book, *Artic Dreams*, Barry Lopez writes that, for the native peoples of the Arctic Circle, "land does... what architecture sometimes does for us. It provides a sense of place, of scale, of history." 
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-I have never gotten that from architecture, but I definitely get it from land.
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-But Lopez's idea struck me because whenever we are around non-travelers I notice how much of the stories I tell are not what happened, but also where it happened. I have developed a largely unconscious need to locate my past in both time and space. I have to watch out for this because I've also noticed it can be annoying, even pretentious-sounding to non-travelers. Space, the land around the event, is information they don't want.
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-But those of us who insist on moving through the land are doing the same thing that Lopez identifies in the Arctic natives, searching out our own sense of scale and history in the land around us.
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-Land becomes paramount to life when you live this way. Where you are is as meaningful as who. Where defines who. 
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-Landscapes rise up become more than backdrops against which we live. They are the mysterious aggregations that shape our lives, all our lives, all the time, but out here it becomes so plain, you feel it deep within. It's not something you seek out. It is something that arrives. Slowly, almost unnoticed. Until one day you realize you're not talking to the trees, you're answering them. 
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-You gain a sense of place by merging into it, however briefly, in way that can only be done by giving up familiarity. Novelty sharpens the experience of place. Perhaps because we evolved to be wary of the novel, to be on edge in experiencing the unfamiliar. All that grass doesn't matter, that one part where it's novel, that one part where there are no shadows when there should be shadows. That's a lion. Novelty is bad in that sense. 
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-Now the evolutionary threat is largely gone though novelty becomes useful. It a grindstone sharpening your experience of place until it comes to the foreground. You notice what was not there yesterday. It's not a lion anymore, but still you notice.