On the intimate connection of person and place.

Considering the land as lover.

Some of us, admittedly, have loved a few.

And though we are not our lovers, we are more whole for having loved.

And so you see this need to choose one place becomes as complicated and complex as being torn between two lovers.

~

Like leaving a lover on one hand.

And with the other, holding onto your hat as you lean into the wind

trembling with the thrill of what lies ahead.

~

Here’s a rambling I’ve been working on a while yet have been slow to share. If you have time and want to read it, grab a cup of coffee, kick back, and enjoy the ride. It’s still rough, but I’ve been having fun working with it, so I thought I’d share what I’ve written so far, and one of these days, maybe I’ll get it figured out and share the rest with you.

I was not an apple that fell close to the tree, but one that rolled away.

The roots of that tree did not hold me, nurture me, nor call me to remain. Yet we are hard wired with that longing to belong, and so I set out, seeking.

In the search for finding belonging, always somewhere outside myself, I thought I found it many times.

Thus there are places I have fallen for, fallen in love with, where I wanted to belong, to be held and where I wished to remain forever. Places I wanted to wake beside as with an intoxicating lover tangled in rumpled sheets still hot and musky as dawn’s first light reminds us it’s time to move on. Or places soothing and solid and comfortable, as when with the lover you’ve slept beside for what feels like forever. She may no longer hold the thrill, but she holds you still, and when you are with her, with that sense of contentment that cannot be compared, there is no place you’d rather be.

Are we not more for each one we have loved? The lessons they shared, the memories we learned to laugh at, the scars on our heart and soul we cannot shake off, all of it cultivating us deeper, richer, wiser for having tasted forbidden fruits.

As with person, so with place.

Me, I have moved. Every time, always yearning for forever.

It’s not how I planned it to be. I was not looking for greener grass (there is none greener, for example, then where I am here and now). But responding to how life unfolds at times, and sometimes that means you gotta move on. Other times, it means following my heart for some calling I thought I heard somewhere out there, only to realize it is found only in the quietest, stillest moments when I allow myself to listen.

Still, I look back on all the places I have wanted to call home, wanted to belong, wanting to be so captivated and fulfilled and content… and yes, always hoping to find these things outside of my self rather than within.

Yet each place we settle into, each one we are with, we say to ourselves, “This is the one.” Until it is not, and then we move on.

I have been many places. Each like a lover, teaching me how to be, how to feel, how to grow, how to leave.

Sure, I could be shallow, pick one and remain. Just tell you I’ll let go of my dreams and “it’s good enough” knowing it’s safer to stay put where it’s easy and simple, and simple is good.

But that is not my style. I tend to dive deep.

Growing up we thought and were taught that New York City was the center of the universe, and for many of us in the suburbs a bridge or tunnel away, it was. My childhood was defined by the sense of not belonging – not to my class nor my peers, not to my family nor my home, not the town where I was raised nor the big city that loomed a mere thirty minute train ride away. It should have been easy to hold onto what is right there before you, and what everyone (but your own inner voice) tells you is true. It was not.

Sure it was a city full of energy, excitement and diversity that kept my younger self entertained. But the prevailing mentality is the same as you’ll find in any small town: where you are is where it’s at; what you see is all there is. Looking beyond is taboo.

I was accepting of that until I left and felt something else, something open, expansive, vast and wild, tearing my heart open as it burned into the once narrow view of my pale eyes and pasty white skin. It was intense, somewhat violent in a way, the process of being ripped free to the wildness of open spaces. Yet that sense of space held me all the same, wrapping around and capturing me. And once I breathed in that spaciousness and had my breath held in the bigness of it all, the search for where I belong began.

Odd that we use the term “deflowering” for the end of virginity when for so many of us it signifies the beginning of so much more. It can be a blooming, blossoming, flourishing. It can be more of an awakening as the floret unfurls, rather than a plucking of petals as in the childish game of, “He loves me; he loves me not.”

Though my innocence had been lost years before, heading to the Greek Islands at nineteen felt like the first awakening. Standing bronzed naked on the cliffs over the Aegean Sea while gazing out into what first felt like forever (though cheap pink wine and an oddly bewitching man probably had something to do with that) my soul expanded into the horizon; that urge to remain in that moment, that place, that ethereal bliss forever overwhelmed. And I realized we could live somehow limitless, boundless, ungrounded as my imagination took me soaring over arid cliffs and ancient stone walls and into gentle, saline waters that held me in her womb, softly singing into my ear, like a temptress snake hissing “Yessssssss, you belong here.”

Until of course there comes the day that you wake up from the daze of the dream and get dumped or somehow shaken or stirred and find yourself moving on.

The calling started then and the voice of wild spaces continued to lure me, like the Pied Piper, leading me out of town.

From the mountains north of Santa Fe with magic mushrooms, dizzy from high altitude and giddy from clear light – to the desert to the south, where we sought to unleash our inner Carlos Castaneda with sand in our sleeping bag and scorpions underfoot.

From the stark vastness of the Patagonia steppe where my heart soared like the condor that I swear called to me – to the high country of the San Juan Mountains where the snow and cold and a culmination of a painful past whipped me like spring wind.

~

The sky appeared above as

a familiar lover I have not slept with in years

but still haunts me in my dreams.

spread out on top of, over, next to, entwined with me

I vaguely recognize the warmth against my back,

wind like lazy fingers through let down hair,

a familiar sweet musky dusty breath.

swelling wide above me was

Colorado high and wild

~

And then there is here, the gentle embrace of this nor Cal river and hills. This is not the California I knew of or heard of and tried to avoid with sunsets cafes and volleyball beaches, strip malls and silicon valley, Hollywood and parking lot traffic. Really, did you think you’d find me there? Trinity is a different sort of state, in mountains and in mind.

Here I am held, softly, gently, kindly in a matriarch’s embrace. Wise old woman arms around me, healing, nurturing, tending the land as I tend to my soul. Nourishing me, not to remain safe, sound and secure – but building courage and vigor to leap once again. The crone’s craft with a basket of herbs, potions and remedies to create a resilient soul. She allows me time to weave my web, the net that will catch me when next I leap, as invariably I will do.

Held, embraced. A womb or cocoon. Wondering what will emerge when I leave these protective walls that confine and define. What is beyond the hills?

Look inside your cells as you look within your soul and tell me what you see? A sense of wonder, awe and curiosity?

Quiet as my voice may be, it whispers of this wisdom: I am more than this space, bigger than one place.

~

Roots unfurling

soaring through deep earth

grounded in the stars

she breaks free the shackles of solid ground

as a whale bounding from the sea for air

finding her breath as if for the first time, each time

finally understanding what wings were made for

ascending into spaciousness.

~

Slowly I fell for this land, with each shovel of dirt moved, brush mowed, branches burned and tree planted, Time sweating in the garden, sleeping beneath the stars or bathing naked at the beach.

Things grow here. Maybe even dreams. Apple trees, pears and plums, even peach trees I have planted. And already their branches bend with abundance.

This land gently grew in me. Her roots spread beneath my flip-flopped feet. I wonder how deep they have sprawled. The garden, full and lush and bountiful enriched by horse droppings I shovel each day. The upper meadow in early evening adorned with long golden shadows and a rolling view of distant hills. Sharing space with deer and turkey and a pair of ravens. Turtles at the swim hole and osprey hunting a shallow pool. The eagle on his daily pass down river as we watch from the kitchen table and the heron gracefully rises as I throw the ball for the dog too close to the bank of the river where he silently stood. The big bend in the river with sheer south facing cliffs above that heat from the sun and in kind warm the water below. The chattering chorus of evening frogs and the full moon dancing behind undulating waves of clouds. And rapids close to the house sing like voices I try to understand as we lay in our starlit bed at night after the wind and crickets have quieted and listen. I still do not know what they say.

It is a gentle land, pastel and creamy. Here is the good boy, fine and nice, the high school sweetheart. Here is not passion, devotion and fierce attachment as I have felt other places, and likely will never be. Yet here holds me in a state of contentment I am not familiar with, cannot describe, something that comes I suppose with age.

Comfort is new for me.

Do you know what it is like to hold the land as dearly as you do a lover; to be seduced, enthralled, captivated by the scent of rich soil and vanilla bark and the feel of wind and light and approaching storms? Go ahead and lose yourself in the embrace of a sudden updraft of high mountain air, or the fragrance of rich earth stirred by heavy rain, or the ecstasy of endlessness of open plains sprawling wide before you, or the soothing sound of waves as tide ever so slowly moves in.

If you have never loved land this deeply, I hope one day you will.

Let yourself be seduced by place.

But, my friend, be warned.

This kind of love is one sided.

For land remains indifferent.

And the connection we feel is that which we create.

I have fooled myself into believing I was embraced by place.

The stories we hold to are ours.

At best, the land allows.

At worst, she’ll chew you up and spit you out.

Likely she’ll do nothing at all but be as she will be, while we hold tight to a sense and security of the familiar, wanting to find ourselves in her rocks and trees, our stories in her wind and waves, wishing her spring rains to define us, and her generous load of winter snow to hold us tight.

So be it. Let it go. The attachment it all ours alone.

Really, that’s not a bad place to be.

Reflecting back, would I have chosen to forfeit the pleasure and pain and played it safe?

Commitment comes. Some of us are late to settle in. Settle into place as I settle into self with the softening of time and age and the perspective of experience.

Am I not all the richer, wiser, more resilient and complete for having frolicked with the land?

Though at times I tumbled, falling for place has led me to soar.

As at times we must lose our self in order to be found. Not only in place but in spirit and soul.

Are we willing to be lost in place order to find the essence of where we belong?

The land has held me, holds me, lets me be.

What more could I ask for with a lover or land?

Places that have called. lured me, seduced and tangled a web within my heart and made it into a place unto itself.

I have been held in place, by place, and that has allowed me to know the land, intimately and intensely, as I have learned to know my self.

Yes, I belong with the land as fiercely as I connect with my lover.

I am not the land, though I will love her, bestow upon her my wild passions and commit to her as long as I am there, wherever there may be.

Until next time,

With love, always love,

Gin