The Heart's Desire

The Call to Recover a Sense of Place  
Fred Lanphear, Contributing Editor

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
     love what it loves.

— Mary Oliver, “The Wild Geese”

We have vague memories of a natural world rife with magic and mystery. As adults, weren’t we supposed to put aside such “childish” views?  And yet, our intimation — shared with Native Americans — that “The Earth is alive,” is a stubborn one. We dwell among “other beings, other forms of awareness, our voices interweave among others more-than-human.”¹

Step outside at dawn and catch the mere snippet of a bird’s song, and you are instantly transported back into this primal oneness with the world. It is only a matter, as the poet Mary Oliver says, of letting “the soft animal of your body love what it loves.”

In this extremely mobile society in which we live, “place” may be experienced as transient. How do we ground ourselves in place and time when there is no sense of permanence or personal connection? And what is the cost of failing to do so? The poet Wendell Berry says that if you don’t know where you are, you don’t know who you are. It is that sense of place that contributes greatly to defining our own identity and, in turn, our responsibility for our earth home.

We are living in a time when each of us is beckoned to discover a personal relationship to the land and our natural surroundings. For some of us, the challenge is to participate in shaping and/or sustaining the immediate landscape that connects us with the natural world and our rightful place in it. For others, it is daring to immerse oneself in the natural world that is accessible to them and to become intimately related. For still others, it is reflecting and recreating the memories and images of childhood, or other times in their lives, when they were most “in touch” with the natural world. For all of us, it is a time of recognizing the impact we as humans have on the planetary ecosystem and to work towards more sustainable patterns that respect the delicate balance of nature.

 Go to The Call to Live in Community
 

 The Dream of the Earth by Thomas Berry (Sierra Club Nature and Natural Philosophy Library, 1988)
     A profound description of our relationship to the natural world which lays out a path of becoming connected to the “larger sacred community to which we belong.”

 A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold (Oxford University Press, 1949)
     This text is a classic description of an intimate journey with nature. It beckons us to be in touch with our natural habitat through disciplined, sensitive observation, and it establishes an authentic context for the declaration of a new land ethic.

 ¹Back to Earth: Tomorrow's Environmentalism by Anthony Weston (Temple University Press, 1994)