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It was such a lovely evening yesterday and I was feeling so lazy that I couldn’t bring myself to spend much time in front of the computer. But today, I want to get back to E. Relph’s book, Place and Placelessness.
To have roots in a place is to have a secure point from which to look out on the world, a firm grasp of one’s own position in the order of things, and a significant spiritual and psychological attachment to somewhere in particular.
And where else can a person feel more attached, more rooted than at home? When you were a kid did you ever write your address out with your room, your house number, your street, your city, your state, your country, followed by Earth, the solar system, the Milky Way, the universe? I did. It was always nice to know that no matter how vast the universe I had a place in it even if it was so very small.
Home is the foundation of our identity as individuals and as members of a community, the dwelling-place of being. Home is not just the house you happen to live in, it is something that can be anywhere, that can be exchanged, but an irreplaceable centre of significance.
If we are lucky, and there are many who aren’t, we have the chance to grow up in a home. My parents still live in the home I grew up in and even after I no longer lived there for years I’d still refer to it as home. Not until I felt that I had created a home of my own did I stop referring to my parents’ house as home. Now my home is in Minneapolis and when Bookman and I talked about the possibility of moving somewhere else a couple years ago neither of us wanted to. It’s not that we love our house and garden so much, we do, but it’s that we feel this place we live, this neighborhood, this city, is home. We have put down roots that run deeper than we expected and the thought of digging ourselves up was rather distressing.
Although in our everyday lives we may be largely unaware of the deep psychological and existential ties we have to the places where we live, the relationships are no less important for that. It may be that it is just the physical appearance, the landscape of a place that is important to us, or it may be an awareness of the persistence of place through time, or the fact that here is where we know and are known, or where the most significant experiences of our lives have occurred. But if we are really rooted in a place and attached to it, if this place is authentically our home, then all of these facets are profoundly significant and inseparable.
Bookman and I didn’t move to Minnesota planning to stay. It was temporary. We had no plans for where we wanted to go afterwards, but we didn’t think we’d be here for more than five or six years. Now and then we’d say things like, “when we leave,” but the leaving never happened. We liked it here. We made friends. We got to know the area and the culture. We bought a house. But even when we bought a house we didn’t think of it as being permanent. Not until two years ago when we finally had a real discussion and realized that this place was home, not just a place we liked living. I think we were both surprised about how deeply we felt about it.
Is home always perfect? No. Do I still dream of living in London or a farm in Vermont (even though I have never been to Vermont)? Sure. Sometimes home feels dull and too close, usually in the middle of winter when it’s -10F (-23C) with a “brisk” wind making it feel another 10-15 degrees colder and I have to get up and go to work, but this, says Relph is normal.
Drudgery is always part of a profound commitment to a place, and any commitment must also involve an acceptance of the restrictions that place imposes and the miseries it may offer. Our experience of place, and especially of home, is a dialectical one — balancing a need to stay with a desire to escape. When one of these needs is too readily satisfied we suffer either from nostalgia and a sense of being uprooted, or from the melancholia that accompanies a feeling of oppression and imprisonment in a place.
I feel very lucky to have found someplace that I can call home and that Bookman calls it home too. For the longest time we were both willing to throw it all over for a big unknown. I think our culture encourages this. We need to be mobile and willing to move anywhere. Buy a house we are told, everyone should, but it is an investment and nothing more (maybe not so much these days). But if you really want to get to know a place and make it home, a person can’t really be moving all the time. Place-making and home-making take time and commitment (whether you realize you are committed or not). It is a shame that placelessness/homelessness is not uncommon. Everyone should have someplace they can feel at home. It is so very human, and, I think, so very necessary for our personal and communal well-being.
Dorothy said it best, there’s no place like home.
I enjoyed reading both your blogs on Place and Placelessness. And I don’t recall that you ever blogged more than once on one book. Surely you have?
The concept of home, place, Querencia, whatever you call it is critically important to many people. I feel the same as Simone Weil:
“To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul.”
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Richard, thanks! I have posted about a book in more than one post before just not very often. Oh yes, Simone Weil! I have her book The Need for Roots. Picked it up secondhand several years ago because it sounded interesting but never got to it. Now I am especially interested in it so I will have to locate it and get it into my reading pile.
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I love this. It’s a book that I am going to read, thanks to the tidbits you’ve been sharing. Such a great point, that we are expected to be willing to exchange our place for careers etc. but feeling rooted takes time and stillness. Like you, I’ve been surprised by how at home I feel in a place never intended to be a permanent location!
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Melwyk, thanks! I hope you can find a copy of the book. We’ve grown extremely impatient, haven’t we? Not even able to stay in place long enough to make it home. But I think there is a growing consciousness among many that we are losing a lot in our moving here and there. It’s amazing how home can sneak up on you when you never intended it to, isn’t it? And when you realize this temporary thing has become something more, it’s a good feeling. 🙂
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Gosh, Stefanie, you really have started me thinking about things. I’ve lived in so many places, Chicago, Ireland, Minnesota, California, Hawaii, South Carolina (given some time I’ll think of a couple more – I was married to an officer in the Marine Corps and we moved). We had finally returned home to Chicago – at least it was home to me. We had small children; I had parents and a brother and childhood friends who still lived there. I’d go to the “old neighborhood” to visit folks, drive by my grade school and the church, or maybe over to the high school convent to visit the nuns who were such important influences in my life. Until one day when my husband announced he wanted to buy a business in Savannah. I agreed because I loved him and wanted him to be happy. It is now 25 years later. I live in the same house we built back then, I have the same phone number. I’ve worked at the same firm for 22 years. I’ve met many wonderful and interesting people here. I am close to the kids who grew up with my children. I’m close to most of their parents. I like my house, my neighborhood. But there was always a something I could never quite put my finger on that was fluttering inside. A restlessness and a feeling of impermanence. I realize now that even after all this time and after all the memories contained in that house, I am not rooted here as you are rooted in Minneapolis. I am happy here, of course. I am content. But it will never be “home,” and I am okay with that – now that you have gotten me to think about it. Of all your posts so far, these two on Place and Placelessness have been the most enlightening to me. Very rich. Thanks for that.
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Grad, thanks for your kind words. It’s really amazing how, in spite of everything, all those marvelous things you have where you are, that you can still not feel like you are home. It is a very hard thing to put a finger on, isn’t it? I can tell you I feel like I am home where I live and I can give you a few reasons but it fails to get down to the very heart. It’s like when you fall in love with someone, you can give all the rational reasons for it but there is always something unexplainable. I am glad you are happy where you are, but I hope someday you are able to go home.
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This blog speaks to me. In order to be closer to a family I love but don’t see very often, I’m now living in a place I hate. I long for the place where I spent most of my adult life, the place that became my ‘home’. I hate moving, but I’ve all but decided that if I ever want to be happy again, I have to go home.
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Joan, thanks! So sorry you are living in a place you do not like. I hope you are one day able to return to the place you love. It’s amazing, isn’t it, how place has such a effect on us.
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That word ‘home’ is so potent. I remember when I was in my third year at College having spent a mid-term weekend with my parents saying without thinking as I got on the train, “I’ll give you a call when I get home,” and seeing the look of horror on my mother’s face. She thought I was leaving home.
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Alex, oh so true about home being potent! I struggled with the where do I call home thing when I was in college too. I was generally very careful to say “call you when I get back to school” as opposed to home. School wasn’t home but it was where I lived and “home” can have that double meaning which makes it tricky sometimes especially when young and transitioning away from home as you’ve always known it.
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This sense of ‘not being home’ gave me so much heartache for my first 10 years or so in California. Especially since having an actual home (not just a temporary, inadequate apartment) was completely out of reach for so long (not even possible in daydreams!). But now that I DO have a home, a house, and am with the person who feels more like home than anyone in the world, I feel very rooted. I don’t especially love the little town where I live although it’s fine, and I’d gladly move back to Oregon if things worked out right, but for now, I feel VERY much “at home” and have no desire to uproot (unless, as I said, conditions were just right). I adore my house and when I’m there, I feel completely “at home” and would still, no matter where that little house and the humans/cats inside it were physically located, as long as we were together and had the house that makes it home.
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wherethereisjoy, finding home can be so hard and take a long time, can’t it? But when you find it, you know it whether you acknowledge consciously or not. So very glad you have found it!
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So true. Thanks for a heartwarming post, Stephanie. I know what you mean about setting roots. I came to Canada and to this City with my family from HK when I was only a young teenager and have been living here for decades. After I married, I moved away from my parents’ home but have been living in the same house for decades as well. Major reason is raising a son I’d wanted him to take roots in a stable environment. Now that he’s away in college, I still don’t want to move. Major reason, too big a chore. And, where else should I go?
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Arti, my mom moved a lot when she was growing up so it was very important for her to give me and my sister a stable home. My parents did it brilliantly and they are still in the same home with years and years of accumulated memories. It is wonderful to have a place like that to go visit. I’m sure your own son will really appreciate at it as the years go by.
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Great quotes from Relph, and I can’t disagree with any of them. I moved quite a lot as a child and teen, with my last place, before I chose my adult place, being one I never felt comfortable in. It was Sydney and Sydney is supposed to be beautiful – and it is – but it wasn’t my kind of beauty. It may not be its fault. It may be that I never settled in after being uprooted from my previous place – a dirty, dusty country town – which I loved, because, I think, of the freedom of my life there. Anyhow, the place I now live, I chose for my first professional job having visited here twice. 38 years later I still don’t regret it. I met my husband here. We’ve lived in other places – in the USA – twice, and loved it, but this is home. It’s home because of the landscape, the life we live and the connections we’ve made.
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whisperinggums, Relph is wonderful and I bet you would like him especially since you’ve been thinking about place lately yourself. You know, when I moved to Minnesota from California people thought I was bonkers. How could I give up living in such paradise? Well, I didn’t see it as paradise even though I’d lived there my whole life. Like your Sydney I’d say yes it’s beautiful and the weather is great but, but, but. I am glad you have found home. It really makes a difference to feel so connected to a place.
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So interesting, Stefanie. I probably complain about Texas quite a bit (heat, politics, etc.) but I have lived in Texas for so long that I wonder what it would be like to live somewhere else. I keep imagining that how great it would be but I’m sure anywhere else will also bring it’s own set of issues to deal with. Of course right now in this horrible heat, I’m thinking, get me outta here and I’m not looking back 😉
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Iliana, heh, your heat is like my cold winters. In January I sometimes seriously wonder what the heck I am doing here! But it’s all part of the over all experience, isn’t it? And as Relph says, being committed to a place means you take the good with the bad. It’s very much a relationship!
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