Place

Reading the Vilhelm Moberg novels about Swedish emigrants in the 1850s has got me thinking about place. And since becoming blog friends with people around the world I’ve had a growing interest in geography. Here are some questions I'm thinking about:

- Why do people relocate? Think of emigrants who have traveled across the Atlantic (or Pacific, or wherever), for weeks or months, risking their lives (think Hmong refugees). There are some obvious reasons, such as poverty, fear of home governments or civil war, religious persecution, etc. But my friend Inge, who moved from Germany in college and stayed here. What made her choose the U.S. over Germany for residence?

- What is there about some places that we connect with on a psychological, even a spiritual level? Like when I went to Paris for the second time, after my parents died, and I felt I found my Self for the first time?

- Why do we choose to live where we live? I mean, why do we stay? What keeps me in this location, now that my parents are gone?

- Growing up with foreign students, and now getting to know blog friends in India, Finland, Hungary, Hawaii, Shanghai, I’ve seen that we are really the same in many ways. But how does our geographical location, our culture, make us different? For instance, living in a very hot climate vs. living in a very cold one. How does heat, or lack of it, affect someone’s psyche?

- How has high speed communication and travel changed how we see ourselves and the world? Why do I feel so connected with the 18th and 19th centuries? Do I long for a time when speed was not part of life?

What I’m most interested in is Place as a character in our lives. As an amateur photographer, I can’t help but notice that other parts of the world are more appealing as a physical backdrop for photographs than where I live. A barn in a Michigan field (above) doesn’t carry the same punch as a barn nestled in the Rockies or the Alps. (I don't have a photo to offer for this one.)

Is beauty a legitimate draw for moving? When Don and I retire, we’d like to move up north to the Traverse City area. Why? What pulls us there? Water of various shades of teal, rolling hills of orchards and stone buildings, tiny towns with old cottages, cliffs overlooking Lake Michigan, woods of pine and spruce, sand dunes, Native American culture. But more than just the beauty, there is also an openness, an artistic perspective where a writer, a painter, a craftsman, can live and feel at home.

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But is that all there is to feeling at home? How do we know we'll feel at rest there? What if we move, settle in, and find that there are other factors that keep us from letting our true selves run free?

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And now I think of it, shouldn't I just feel at home in myself, regardless of location?