Journey in Place: A Field Guide to Belonging

Why not work on building the deepest relationship of your life?That relationship is with your place.◆◆◆Maybe you feel out of place. Ungrounded. New to the suburbs, lost in the city, lonely in the rural.Maybe you want to get outside more. Learn the names of birds.Maybe you're already in love with your place and you want to listen to trees. Hear the stars singing.Whatever your situation, this book seeks to answer one major question, How to learn to be in place.How to love our place. How to witness our place and have our place witness us.◆◆◆Journey in Place contains 52 explorations.Each includesa tiny essay on some aspect of placea feet-on-the-ground exercisea writing prompthandouts and worksheetsan occasional recipe or photographa reading listencouragement to get outside.That's 52 ideas on how to belong to your place.◆◆◆Wondering how this book came to be?One fall after the pandemic, I was giving a talk on a college campus when a young person in the front row raised their hand and asked a question I'd never been asked.How do you learn to be in place?The student had been told daily that place doesn't matter. We destroy places. We homogenize them. We focus on built environments, technology, and social interaction. The student sensed she was missing something. What would a place-based life look like? How does one learn to be in place?Yes, I said, we are made of place. We are meant to experience living in a human body within a landscape, to deeply know Earth's cycles, to live within those cycles. Placelessness shows up in us as a kind of homelessness.The student's question stayed with me, and I decided to do something.◆◆◆I created the book Journey in Place, a manual for♥ getting to know a place♥ falling in love with place♥ living well in place◆◆◆Where you live does not matter.Eighty percent of us live in highly populated cities and can attest to the presence of, and accessibility to, wildness. Vast amounts of life and evidence of native ecosystems can be found in cities.  ln this book I make a directed effort to think about place differently, as the environment around us.◆◆◆Some folks who wish to journey in place experience mobility and other physical challenges. In many of these explorations, you are asked to get outside. If at all possible, do. A spot on a porch or deck or balcony is fine. If you can't get outside, position yourself by an open window.◆◆◆I believe that we haven't even begun to scratch the surface of our understanding of place.I think that the place of our nativity never quits calling to us, as if we were homing pigeons. I believe we're made of place, elementally, that it lives in our DNA. Sometimes I believe that our places choose us, not the other way around. I believe that climate change is destroying places rapidly.◆◆◆7 Things You Can Get From Journey in Place--✓ You can become a scholar of your place.✓ You can deepen your relationship to it.✓ You can pinpoint where your heart intersects with landscape.✓ You can build more meaning into your life.✓ You can strengthen the fabric of life around you and find a support network in the Earth itself.✓ You can heal a soul-wound.✓ You can find a sense of belonging.This suggests that you could be a very different person in a year.And why not?Why not bring a global environmental ethic down to the specific and personal?Why not find a way to belong?