“Being engaged in some way for the good of the community, whatever that community, is a factor in a meaningful life. We long to belong, and belonging and caring anchors our sense of place in the universe” Patricia Churchland
For many people, there is a cultural sense of place that roots us in traditions and connection to a place (usually where we are born or have spent much of our lives), but it is usually the human-built aspect of place or a sense of ownership about a place. This is a broad generalization of course. We all have reasons we connect with a ‘place.’ A ‘Sense of Place’ is also important to our psyches as shown by how people have a deep-rooted sense of ‘place attachment’ to the places where they grew up and/or live – it embodies more than just feelings of connectivity, but also personal identity, personal meaning, and is often the root of values and beliefs that set one’s early worldviews.
Indigenous peoples (Leavers) had a deep connectivity that extended to the very core of the natural world itself. For them the natural world wasn’t just something to be used, but an extension of themselves. This feeling of connectively to a place is an elusive thing to measure, yet encourages us to think about ourselves through stewardship of areas as something much more than simply looking after them, as emphasized through conservation or even environmentalism. It’s being more ecocentric and developing ‘soliphila’ not just for a place we love, but for the planet – Gaia itself, or ‘herself’ as many traditions refer to the planet. For Leavers, it was a core understanding of how birth, creation, and being nurtured for life began with Gaia herself.
As Scott et al. state in Psychology for Sustainability: “…soliphilia, a feeling of deep caring and responsibility for a particular bioregion and its inhabits [human and non-human] may serve as a psychological foundation for sustainable behavior. People seem to have a kind of nostaligia (Solistalgia) for unaltered landscapes when beloved areas are threatened by development or environment hazards.” This was eloquently stated by Aldo Leopold in 1949 when considering wild areas, “Man always kills the thing he loves. And so we, the pioneers, have killed our wilderness. Some say we had to. Be that as it may, I am glad I shall never be young without wild country to be young in.”
I love this last comment from Leopold about wild country. Where I grew up in northern England, it had wild areas like moorland and mountains, but could not be considered wild per se, not like real wilderness, since the land had been ‘tamed’ for many millennia. Yet, for me as a young boy, escaping into the ‘wild’ was exciting and a chance to explore a world with little evidence of modern human intrusion. As a young boy, free unstructured active play in the ‘wild’ was incredibly influential on my concept of what ‘sense of place’ could be. Despite much Love from my parents, for me as a highly sensitive and highly empathic boy, the ‘wild’ was also an escape from the human world that I perceived as hard, cold, unyielding, and uncaring. For me the natural world has always been a nurturing place, which is probably why I now understand the ‘Leaver’ connection to it. While this was much more than most of my friends at that time, I now see it more and more as we move into a new era for humanity.
In an earlier post I talk about rewilding our lives (see Spirituality, Service, and Connectedness – Part 14 – Rewilding our lives {October 2021}) as part of the push to develop a much needed spiritual connection to the natural world. In that post I talk about how my sense of the wild developed after I emigrated to the U.S. After a month-long trip to northern Alaska I gained a sense of what the world once looked like before modern humans started to despoil it. Not that I advocate primitivism as a way of life. I like much of modern living. Between visiting wilderness and indigenous peoples still living in the real wild, I got a greater understanding of a spiritual aspect of ‘sense of place.’
The concept of place is well defined in various ways within geographical and anthropological disciplines. One is ‘area having unique physical and human characteristics interconnected with other places.’ But, unlike the idea it is simply a location to locale with an emotional connection. It is the latter that I think is ignored the most in our rush to post-modernity. Our emotions are attached to an area based on our experiences. ”Place can be applied at any scale and does not necessarily have to be fixed in either time or space.” That’s how I sense ‘place’ for myself. Wherever I live or travel, I have reached a point where I feel deep connection to a place. While I haven’t travelled as much as I would have liked, my empathic senses connect me to this planet we call home more globally. In an odd way I have become a global citizen where my experiences have been positive ones that allowed me to create an emotional bond to environments and different human cultures. This even expands to ones I have never visited.
I have been blessed never to have been in a war zone while it has been happening, but I have reached a point where I do not feel hate or rage for the perpetrators of unimaginable violence. In those areas, I feel great sadness for the ones doing the violence and incredible empathy for those suffering its consequences. I know I am not alone in my global sense of place. Indeed, in recent years I have been meeting many people who share my feelings. In a recent post (Miscellaneous Musings – Part 15: War: What is it good for? (October 2023}) I discussed the notion of war, and even the notion that we are finally reaching a point where we are ready to say no to the hierarchical psychopaths that keep us going to war. I know that seems hard to believe with all the carnage currently going on around the world, but with the way the Cabal have been acting, this past-few years, I feel that collectively, humanity has reached a point it is ready for change unprecedented in thousands of years of its so called ‘civilized’ state.
In my travels, I have met an amazing number of conflict refugees who found themselves transplanted to safer places. Indeed, in my recent journey through Scandinavia, many of the service staff I encountered and talked with were refugees of one form or another from all over the planet. They all talked lovingly about their ‘home places’ and finding roots in a new place. Its hard to explain, but this translocation of people on such a scale across the planet, never seen before, may be the impetus for a new kind of global citizen not seen before. While xenophobic feelings may still be high within local populations in many countries, this unprecedented mixing of cultures and ethnicities may, over a short-few-years, be the catalyst for a new kind of peace movement. Indeed, it is already happening but the Cabal controlled mainstream media are not letting us all see it.
“Peace does not mean an absence of conflicts; differences will always be there. Peace means solving these differences through peaceful means; through dialogue, education, knowledge; and through humane ways” The Dalai Lama.
I have always referred to myself as a rational optimist. I observe the worst angels of humanity, but I also observe the better angels of human behavior shining through all the darkness. I know from my parents’ generation experiences of WWII and talking with refugees and people having served in the military that this insanity of war is not natural to humanity. While humans might have aggressive tendencies that have been stoked over the millennia, the natural state for most people (not psychopaths) is for peace. The amazing rise of the feminine and the changing role of the masculine this past few decades is evidence that humanity is reaching a critical threshold of balance that promises a new kind of empathic connection to each other and the natural world. If we can ignore the pathological hierarchies attempts to get us to continue hate and fear, then maybe we have a chance at a new kind of truly sustainable world in which humans live with a global ‘sense of place’ within the world and not just on it in one place.
To Be Continued ……
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