On Monday night KUER FM 90's Doug Fabrizio hosted a live broadcast of Radio West from the Rose Wagner Theater in Salt Lake City, featuring independent producer Jay Allison, the creator of Lost and Found Sound, This I Believe, and the topic for the show that night, Stories From the Heart of the Land.Sense of place. It's something that I think about all the time. I repeat those three words over and over again in my head. When I run on trails in the Wasatch. When I ride along a long empty stretch of Uintah road. When I write.
Identifying with my natural home is important and meaningful to me. My relationship with the place where I live is fundamental to who I am. Just as your relationship to your place is fundamental to who you are. And our relationships leave marks. On our skin, in our eyes, in our hair, on our spirit, in our blood, under our fingernails. Our place becomes us. No. We become it.
I notice when people look like their place — when they take on character given to them as a gift by the weather or the soil or the rock or the water or the trees that are facets of the place that they call home. I notice and appreciate. I adore my dad's brown leather hands, Clarence's wind- and history-lined forehead, the graceful years-of-cultivating bend in my grandmother's back, Cameron's dry lips, the Wyoming mountain sun wrinkles around David's eyes and the Dakota sky-reflected-in-water color of Leasa's.
And when storytellers blend the landscape into the features and personalities of their characters? I cannot resist connection.
The human relationship with natural place is the focus of Stories from the Heart of the Land. So I was riveted on Monday night and I want to share. If you have the time, please check out the podcast, even if you can only listen a few minutes at a time.
And I'd love to hear your story. Where's your place?
Posts
3 comments:
So beautiful. Have you read:
"The Abstract Wild" and "Teewinot" by Jack Turner?
"The Book of Yaak" by Rick Bass?
"The Spell of the Sensuous" by David Abram?
"Refuge" by Terry Tempest Williams?
"A sense of where you are" and "Encounters with the arch druid" by John McPhee?
I know - I'm overwhelming with the recommendations. But they're all amazing. This - our natural homes and how they create and affect our language - is what I studied in college. It's a passion of mine. I have more to say, but I'll take it offline.
I tend to be wary of people who claim to create things, when they were around for quite some time previously.
"This I Believe" was originally hosted by Edward R. Murrow on CBS back in the 1950s.
But I guess that's not really the point.
My place ... I'm still trying to determine exactly where my place is ...
It's the Tennessee River, drifting along in a fishing boat. It's Chickamauga Lake learning how to slalom. It's the dogwood tree in front of my great-grandmother's house in Chattanooga.
It's the treehouse my friends and I built with stolen building materials from the houses in our new development above Lotus Lake in Chanhassen, Minnesota.
It's the cobbled roads and small little cafes and bars of Belgium, albeit not by bicycle, as I wasn't a cyclist then.
It's the North Beach bars and jazz clubs of San Francisco. It's the streets of San Francisco dodging buses and taxis, and the roads of Marin County where I truly came into my own as a cyclist.
And it's rapidly becoming the Utah mountains and canyons, where my knees scream on each attempt to climb higher, but my heart soars as I descend, whether with boards strapped to my feet, or astride my trusty steel steed.
I have a long way to go before I am defined by any one particular place, but as long as the journey continues, I will take it all in and make it a part of who I am, and who I want to be.
KGB. Would love to talk to you, any time and lots, about nature's influence on language.
Flahute. My fault, not his. "Producer of..." would have been a better choice of words. He also wasn't the sole producer of "Lost and Found Sound" -- he collaborated with the Kitchen Sisters.
All those places are yours. You don't need to find just one, unless, of course, that's your personal quest. Thanks for sharing.
Post a Comment